My brother looking out over Albuquerque.

In July 2006 – the summer before my freshman year at Drexel – I was 17. My father, brother, sister and myself visited family in Albuquerque, NM. It was my first time on a commercial airplane; until that point, the furthest I'd been from New York was Virginia. The borders of my sheltered life came tumbling down to reveal a much larger and magnificent world, waiting to be explored.

I had watched countless films romanticize the American West but, being an East-coaster I had low expectations for the desert. What could possibly be beautiful about sand and rocks that weren’t on a beach? I had never been more wrong. Driving, hiking, walking through the inescapable beauty of a seemingly infinite desert – through the rocky valleys, chasing every sign of life attempting to fight the merciless sun – will forever remain one of my favorite memories.

Somewhere between Albuquerque and Los Alamos. I honestly could not tell you where.

As a child, my father taught me to use his camera, a Minolta XGM SLR. His main lessons were simple: take your time, make the shot count, squeeze the shutter. On this trip, for the first time, full command of the camera was placed in my hands. I was allowed to let my eye see what it saw, unhindered and unsupervised. During Superstorm Sandy, I thought the photos were in the shuffle of belongings lost to the damage. However, I recently found some of the photos and negatives at the bottom of a box buried in a storage unit, safe and sound, unaffected by the flood (unfortunately some of them are still missing). It’s interesting to see what caught my eye back then and how it compares to my memory; most of the images are somewhat plain compared to what I shoot now.

And awkwardly framed shot of my grandfather mid-sentence.

One of many okay-ish photos of a petroglyph.

Ancestral Puebloan home at Bandelier National Monument. Really, 17-year-old-me? There's no depth here. Geez.

Inside Bandelier. This one isn't so bad.

If I remember correctly these are the Sandia Mountains...

Nostalgia can be an incredibly powerful force. It warps our memories based on the emotion we assign it, attaches smells and sounds to trigger the emotion, and shapes the way we view life. Our memories can’t be trusted in the long run; reality can never quite live up to what we have tucked away in our hippocampus. I’m not certain what I expected to find in these negatives, but they didn’t quite live up to my expectations. I remember the desert being far more impressive and less, well, green. What I do see here is a beginning. My visual style began to take shape and blaze its own path. We all start somewhere. I guess for me, it was in New Mexico in 2006.