I’ve been shooting music since 2009, long before I ever called it work, long before I understood it as the path.

I was just a fan in the crowd, moving through the pulse of hip hop shows, learning the rhythm of a room through basslines and bodies and the shared electricity of something happening right in front of you.

The camera came later, but it didn’t feel like an arrival so much as a recognition. It slid into my hands like it had always been waiting there. I started bringing it into venues, into tight corners of sweaty rooms, into the blur of strobe lights and shout-sung hooks. And almost immediately, it changed everything. It gave me a way in. Not just to the stage, but to the people around me. The punters became familiar faces. Familiar faces became friends. Friends became a kind of accidental family stitched together by late nights, train rides home, and the afterglow of shows that felt bigger than the sum of their sound.

Through hip hop, I found a community that didn’t just exist on stage, but everywhere around it. The camera became a kind of translator, a small metal object that turned distance into conversation. It let me communicate without words, to participate without needing to perform anything other than attention.

That attention carried me far beyond where I started. From Australian hip hop shows in small rooms and open-air festivals, to documenting artists across continents, to standing backstage at moments I once only knew as a fan. It eventually took me all the way to the United States, where music continued to be both compass and home.

None of that would have happened without hip hop, and without the way photography opened a door I didn’t even know I was knocking on. What started as documentation became belonging. What started as observation became participation.

I’ve always seen music as the core of everything I do. It’s where I learned how to look, how to listen, how to be present. And I still hope that in these images, you can feel that same thing I felt in the beginning. The closeness. The movement. The quiet recognition that you are exactly where you are meant to be, right in the middle of the sound.