In Refiner’s Fire I create a black-and-white self-portrait series exploring the stark, unrelenting reality of mid-life clarity—something far more terrifying than a mid-life crisis. A crisis is chaotic, a frantic grasp for youth, reinvention, or escape. Clarity, however, is merciless. It doesn’t offer distraction or illusion; it strips everything down to the bone. It forces reckoning.

Refiner’s Fire draws from the series Divining Masculinity and Psalms, using high-contrast monochrome photography to illuminate the raw, unavoidable truths of aging, mortality, and identity. Mid-life clarity is not a crisis to survive—it is a fire to endure, one that purges falsehoods, confronts the weight of past choices, and demands acceptance of what remains.

The title comes from Malachi 3:2-3, where the refiner’s fire burns away impurities, leaving only what is pure and indestructible. This is the process of clarity: the destruction of self-deception, the unbearable weight of knowing, and the slow, deliberate transformation into something real.