Give AV a camera and a construction crew. He’ll have a story worth telling by lunch.
East Texas is where AV was born. But ask him where he grew up and you’ll get a different answer — selling encyclopedias door to door in Nashville, spending two years in Beijing learning Mandarin and competing as a dancer across China, hitchhiking across the United States on $5 a day after leaving the Air Force. By the time he picked up a camera, he’d already spent years learning how to walk into unfamiliar rooms and make people feel at ease. That part, it turns out, matters more than the gear.
The last decade has taken him from New Orleans’ underground car drifting scene to West African surf breaks to the careening rickshaw drivers of northern Pakistan and, more recently, to job sites across America, filming the people building critical infrastructure.
The subject matter changes. The instinct doesn’t. AV loves people in a way that’s almost unimaginable, and it shows on camera. Getting someone to open up, really open up, is a skill most filmmakers spend years chasing. For AV, it’s just a conversation.
At FieldWrk, that means being the person who shows up on a job site in the middle of nowhere, earns the crew’s trust by lunch, and leaves with footage that makes the people in it proud.
When he’s not on the road, AV is in Brooklyn doing what he always does: creating. He shoots on his own time, has strong opinions about cameras (“the FX6 is horrible and extremely overrated, fight me”), and claims his cookies will knock your socks off. He’s made them in the thousands, so we’ll take his word for it. He also has an open invitation for anyone who thinks they won’t open up on camera. He considers it a personal challenge, and he’s never lost.
