I first discovered photography through an old shoebox of yellowing pictures on my grandparents’ kitchen table in Italy. They were born into extreme poverty at the beginning of the 20th century in the malaria-ridden swamps of southern Tuscany. Their pictures quickly became a portal for me to travel to a different era. They became a visual corroboration of the oral histories I heard over and over around a bowl of roasted chestnuts during the long winter evenings of my childhood. My passion for photography is about documenting and preserving oral culture. The main subjects of my personal work have been unsung heroes of everyday life: everyday people. For many years I worked for CBS News, traveling around the world learning to tell visual stories. Now, based between New York City and the Caribbean, I continue to find stories worth documenting and people worth giving voice to.