People are strange looking. I can walk down any street in Manhattan, look around myself, and observe an entire world of crags, valleys, bumps, scars, colors, and other features visible on every face. A large portion of the vast advertising industry's budget is devoted to ironing out these flaws, to creating fictional representations of perfect humans. These faces surround me as well - on the sides of buses, billboards, and subway posters.

My series Imaginary Friends began with a three week trip to Florence, Italy in 2008. While there I planned to create images by digitally combining pictures of multiple tourist destinations, fashioning familiar but unreal travel photographs. Although this idea proved impractical at the time, I have remained interested in the idea of creating imaginary photographs. This idea gave birth to a series of portraits comprised of pieces of many individuals' faces.

During the process of constructing these faces, I came to appreciate how interesting the real faces we see every day can be. Following this train of thought, I began a second iteration of this project. Imaginary Friends II features sets of three faces - one a straight portrait, and two composite faces based on that portrait. By placing the real and the imaginary next to each other in these triptychs I wish to examine how intriguing the face of a regular person can be.

Combing through hundreds of faces and thousands of individual pictures to find the perfect pair of bushy eyebrows has greatly changed my definition of "perfect". I find it much harder to ignore the barrage of manipulated faces I see in advertising. Similarly, this work strongly influences the way I look at individuals I photograph. Whereas a traditional portrait artist might pay careful attention to something like a smudge in makeup, I find myself concerned with trying to keep both ear hair and nose hair in focus and well lit, or coaxing a subject into contorting their face so that wrinkles become more pronounced. Learning to pay attention to the small, unique details that each person shares with me when we exchange a glance has transformed the average subway ride or supermarket visit into intimate gallery openings filled with inspiration.