Artist Statement:

           This series of work is a re-creation of real instances people have gone through because of opioid addiction. Each image is an event that happened to someone who was either on opioids or has a loved one who was.

            I’ve created this work over the course of seven months due to my own personal experience. I wanted to bring attention to the subject in a different way than what people are used to seeing. To do this, I took stories of events real people in the situation have lived through and photographed them in a cinematic way to push the drama and emotion that stands behind the meaning. I’m hoping that it will open peoples’ eyes to realize how difficult being on either side of the situation is, that these people are loved and struggling, and to want to do something more to help. I genuinely want to humanize the situation so others can sympathize. This work, like most of my work before it, will pull emotion from the audience and bring awareness about a topic.

            The most important thing I want people to take away from this series of work is that this is real suffering and heartbreak that people go through, that the people who are addicted to opioids are still loved and valued, and their addiction is not their worth. I want people to want to help the epidemic, to want help these people. I want to open the viewers’ eyes to a situation that’s only getting worse.