In the remote highlands outside Ölgii, in Mongolia’s far west, Kazakh families still practice the ancient tradition of eagle hunting. Training golden eagles to hunt across vast, open terrain. It is one of the last living expressions of a partnership between humans and wild animals that stretches back centuries.

I traveled to the Altai region alongside award-winning photojournalist Claire Thomas to photograph these families in their daily lives. We stayed in their homes in some of the most remote areas of the country, shared meals, and listened as they talked about their traditions, their craft, and the pressures threatening both. The intimacy of that access…sitting with a family, as they described what eagle hunting means to their identity, shaped everything about how I approach documentary work.

This trip became the foundation for my ongoing long-term project, The Last Nomads of the Dzud, which follows herder families confronting the catastrophic winter conditions, intensified by climate change, that have killed over 8 million livestock in the past two years and are threatening the survival of Mongolia’s nomadic pastoral culture.

I traveled to the village of Dagabo, a few hours outside Bamako, with One Global Village (OGV) to document a community being built from the ground up. OGV was establishing a farming program, a hospital focused on maternal care for women who often become pregnant without access to medical resources, and a school system designed to educate villagers for generations to come. The school also provides daily meals, easing the burden on families who would otherwise struggle to feed their children on their own.

I also traveled with Ibrahim Kante, a Kansas City based soccer coach originally from Mali, who is building a youth soccer program in the community. His work addresses something that statistics often miss: the need for purpose and identity among young people in a region where children face constant pressure to leave their villages for the surrounding gold mines. Many are forced by militias into slave labor under extremely dangerous conditions. A soccer pitch is not a luxury in Dagabo. It’s a lifeline.

Mali showed me what comprehensive community investment looks like when it’s led by people who understand the culture from the inside. Healthcare, education, food security, and youth development, not as separate programs, but as a single interconnected commitment to a place and its people.

I traveled to the small town of Gulu in northern Uganda with Medical Missions Foundation to document volunteer physicians from the United States performing surgeries for patients who would otherwise have no access to care.

Many of the patients were women who had survived brutal violence at the hands of local militias and mercenaries. The injuries they carried were severe, and in many cases had gone untreated for years. Watching volunteer surgeons operate in a small clinic, knowing the difference a single procedure could make in someone’s life, was one of the most sobering experiences of my career.

What struck me most in Gulu was the contrast between the scale of the violence these communities had endured and the quiet, precise nature of the work being done to address it. One surgeon, one patient, one operation at a time. The images here reflect that. Not the spectacle of crisis, but the human-scale work of repair.

I traveled to the city of Bhopal in central India with One Global Village to document volunteer physicians from the United States performing free surgeries for a community still bearing the consequences of the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster. The worst industrial catastrophe in history. Decades later, Bhopal's residents continue to face health challenges compounded by limited access to care.

Over the course of just four days, the volunteer surgical team performed more than 140 procedures. I documented the operations, the recoveries, and the moments in between. The waiting rooms, the families, the quiet conversations that hold more weight than any statistic.

One patient, Aryan, had traveled over ten hours by train to return to the clinic. Not for treatment, but to find the surgeon who had changed his life. A year earlier, Dr. Brandon Johnson had removed a goiter the size of a basketball from Aryan's neck. Before the surgery, Aryan's retail tailor shop had no customers as patrons were hesitant to interact with him due to his appearance. After the surgery, his business was restored, and with it his livelihood. When he saw Brandon for the first time since the operation, he wept. It was among the most powerful things I have ever witnessed, and it confirmed what I believe documentary photography is for: to make visible the moments where one person's commitment transforms another person's life.

I traveled to Haiti with United Aid Foundation to document their work in remote, underserved communities outside Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the earthquake. The mission was direct: rebuild homes for families who had lost everything. My role was to photograph the work and the people at the center of it.

What I found went beyond the reconstruction effort. In neighborhoods still marked by devastation, daily life continued with a resilience that no headline could capture. Children walked to school past rubble. Families cooked meals in half-standing kitchens. People rebuilt not just structures but routines, relationships, and a sense of normalcy in conditions that were anything but normal.

Haiti taught me that the most important images in humanitarian documentary work are not the ones that show destruction. They’re the ones that show what people do next. The dignity of rebuilding, the refusal to be defined by catastrophe. That principle has guided every documentary project I’ve taken on since.