I had the tremendous opportunity to go behind-the-scenes as Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet prepared for their new production of The Sleeping Beauty. They are making 268 new costumes designed by Paul Tazewell, the Oscar-nominated costume designer for Wicked, and have built a new set incorporating Native designs, created by renowned Tlingit artist Preston Singletary.
I photographed inside the PNB’s costume shop as crews were putting the finishing touches on some of the new costumes, and dancers’ rehearsals in a studio setting and on the new stage at McCaw Hall.
For Bloomberg News and the New York Times, I spent many days (and nights!) in Everett, Renton, Seattle, and other places around the region covering the lengthy Boeing Machinists strike from September to November 2024. I covered everything from the first walkout and vote to resoundingly reject the initial contract offering to the midnight start of the strike to the round-the-clock picket lines by the side of the highway and outside different Boeing facilities and finally to multiple contract rejections and ultimately a final contract acceptance and abandonment of the strike locations.
It was exhausting keeping up with all the developments, especially the first couple of days of the strike, but a pleasure to get so much time to work on one ongoing story.
More than a month ago, and weeks before the big Nobel Prize news was announced, I had a (very) few minutes with University of Washington professor David Baker, for local magazine Seattle Met. Then, last week, the Nobel committee announced that Baker was one of the recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on computational protein design. After the few minutes with Dr. Baker, I spent a little time photographing his 3D-printed models of synthetic proteins and other structures, the designs of which have promising potential in the field of medicine.
A big thanks to Nate at Seattle Met for the call on this assignment, which was my first for the publication. Here’s a link to the interview.
Over the course of two and a half days, I worked with writer Harriet Alexander on two stories for The Times of London on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula: looking at Twilight-related tourism in the tiny town of Forks, Washington, now almost two decades after the first Twilight book was published, and a look at the political sentiment in Clallam County, deemed by many to be the last bellwether county in the US.
For the first, we spent a day speaking with locals, tourists, and businesses about how the vampire and werewolf franchise Twilight still brings people from around the world to one of the most remote parts of Washington State. Some are tired of all the traffic and difficulty getting a table at the local diner, but others think that with the decline in logging in the region, without Twilight, there might not be much left to Forks.
Clallam County, the last bellwether
And the second story for the Times was about how election results in Clallam County over the past 40 years have matched the winner of the national presidential election. We spoke with local politicians, voters, party activists, and everyone in between.
Ultimately, after November’s election results were tabulated, Clallam County lost it’s status as a bellwether for the national electorate. The county’s citizens voted 52% to 44% in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump.
A last minute addition to the work I was doing at the RNC, I photographed Scott Bessent, thes the founder of the Key Square Group investment firm and a financial adviser and top fundraiser for former president Donald Trump, on Day 2 of the Republican National Convention in the Bloomberg HQ in a restaurant near the convention site in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s considered a top candidate for Treasury secretary if Trump wins the 2024 presidential race.
Due to travel, security, and timing, I didn’t have the luxury of light stands, light modifiers, more than one light, an assistant, choice of portrait location, or time… Bessent agreed to have a portrait taken between talking on a live Bloomberg broadcast in the same space, which was the Bloomberg team’s newsroom for the convention, and his dinner that night. With Bessent’s assistant holding my bare-bulb flash, first frame to last frame was 6 minutes.
Thanks to Jane and Aeriel for trust and support behind the scenes!
I’ve added a new story to my website, and it’s a subject I’ve been trying to cover for nearly 8 years! And for the first time, I’ve used a little video and animated gifs.
For Bloomberg Businessweek, I photographed how exactly 100,000 balloons are dropped on the final night of American political conventions.
The balloon drops at almost every Republican National Convention and Democratic National Convention in the last four decades have been the work of Treb Heining, a man who has a claim to creating the entire balloon decorating industry.
Treb led a crew of balloon professionals and local volunteers as they inflated and tied, by hand over the course of three days, approximately 100,000 balloons to be mounted in the ceiling and dropped on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Big thanks to Jane Yeomans and Aeriel Brown for taking my pitch (twice!) and helping make this project a reality.