Speech Text, May 16, 2026
Graduating class, it is an immense pleasure to talk to you today.
All of you have lived and studied through a year of fear, disruption, anger, uncertainty, and enormous change.
I will come back to this later. The thing I want you to talk about first is your choice to live the life of an artist.
Four years ago, you took a leap of faith when you came to MCAD, believing it would become an important part of your journey.
It will not be the last leap of faith you make.
The life of an artist is built on faith.
• Faith in your technique.
• Faith in your vision.
• Faith in what you have to say.
And because of that, the life of an artist is not a straight line. It never has been.
I want to briefly share a little of my own journey as a photographer in hopes that observing my winding path may help you keep the faith as you live out your path.
Like so many photographers starting out, I dreamed of being published in National Geographic. In the 1990s, National Geographic was all about exotic places and the people who lived there, so I photographed my way through India.
Looking back, this was a ridiculous idea for me. I had no insight into, or passion for, India.
I grew up on a remote farm in the Australian Outback. Nature was not something we visited. It ruled our lives. Drought and flood were not abstractions. They shaped how I understood the world.
From early on, I was drawn to finding beauty in difficult, unforgiving places. Even in a patch of desert baked hard by the Australian sun, there were patterns and textures, signs of beauty and meaning.
When I looked back at my pictures from India, I realized something uncomfortable. I did not know the name, let alone the story, of a single person I had photographed. I was making images I thought other people wanted. I thought they might make me successful.
I’m now profoundly embarrassed by that work. I had turned other people’s lives into visual souvenirs.
That was my first real glimpse of an important truth: meaningful art comes from a place of genuine care.
And for me, that place was always the natural world.
So I realigned.
Photographically, I came back to who I really was: someone who cared deeply about nature.
Oddly enough, the pandemic sharpened that direction.
Out of a desperate need to get out of the house, I began photographing a local beach every evening.
One hundred yards of sand and surf came to define that period of my life.
As that nightly ritual took shape, I slowed down enough to really notice things. Tiny shifts. Small details. Repeated forms.
Photography became less about making pictures and more about learning how to see, about discovering the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
My focus became patterns in nature.
That fascination eventually carried me to some of the farthest reaches of the planet, from mountain summits to microscopic worlds.
And over time, it became clear that there might be enough work for a book.
Naively, I thought making the book would be easy.
I selected the images, sequenced them, printed out a paper mock-up, and it was terrible. Even I wouldn’t buy this book.
My inner critic immediately went to work. It tried to convince me there was no book there at all. That I was kidding myself.
Thankfully, by then I had become part of a community of artists. I had people I could turn to for help.
That was not easy. It meant admitting failure to people whose opinions I deeply respected.
But those people kept the project alive. Not with empty encouragement, but with honest, thoughtful, informed advice. They also helped me understand something else: I could not do it alone. I needed editors. I needed designers. I needed other people to help bring the work fully to life.
The journey from sitting on the floor surrounded by piles of prints to having a pallet of books delivered to my door took about three years.
And those three years were not easy. I spent far more time editing, sequencing, and working with designers than I did out in the field photographing. I made so many proofs that I ended up having to replace my printer.
And the great irony is that once I finally committed to what I cared about most, and focused fully on the work itself, National Geographic published a feature on both me and the book last month.
Looking back, a few things stand out.
First: figure out who you are and what matters to you.
Spend the time to understand what you genuinely care about, because the strongest work comes from conviction, not imitation. If your work is disconnected from your values, it may succeed on the surface, but it will rarely feel meaningful.
Second: be very good at your craft.
Authenticity matters, but it is not enough on its own. You owe your ideas discipline. You owe them skill. You owe them the persistence required to express them well.
Third: do not do this alone.
No meaningful body of work is built entirely in isolation. Community matters, not for praise, but for honesty, perspective, support, and the kind of guidance that can carry a project much further than you could ever take it on your own.
And finally: listen to others, but remember that you own the final outcome.
Seek out thoughtful criticism. Stay open to what others can teach you. But in the end, the work is yours, and so is the responsibility for what it becomes.
As an artist, you will change. You will evolve. At times, that process will be uncomfortable. Sometimes it will be painful. But that is part of the path you have chosen.
The life of an artist is, in many ways, a series of leaps of faith.
Your journey is not just about enduring. It is about trusting yourself through adaptation, through self-discovery, through doubt, through reinvention, and through the quiet decision to keep going.
So keep going – even in the toughest of times – times like the last year.
As artists we are the ones who comment on society. That is part of our calling.
Be true to yourself.
Make work that comes from who you are and what you care about.
That is the work that will sustain you.
That is the work that will matter.
And in time, the results will come.
Keep taking those leaps of faith.
Congratulations. And happy graduation day.
