“I feel like you can’t care about something, something being the world, if you don’t notice it.”
- Keri Smith
I just love that feeling when things come together. When you start to notice the same theme repeating, similar ideas popping up over and over. It’s as if the universe is gently guiding your attention, if only you’ll stand still long enough to notice.
Lately the recurring theme seems to actually be the noticing itself.
I’ve always struggled with how to describe what I photograph when people ask; I don’t really feel like I fit neatly into any particular category. Sometimes I make images of plants or animals, but I’m not really a nature photographer. I do take pictures of the land, but I wouldn’t say that I’m a landscape photographer. Sometimes my pictures include people, but in my personal work I’m not really a portrait photographer, certainly not strictly. I occasionally skirt the lines of street photography and still life. The term “fine art photography” feels simultaneously too abstract and too stiff, yet I don’t feel like “vernacular photography” really fits either. I’m at some weird junction in between; the strange intersection - if such a thing exists - of all of these.
In talking with my friend Donna about it she suggested I use the answer she’s been giving people lately: I take pictures of what I notice.
So simple. And so true. Like when I noticed the way the sunlight created the most beautiful, crisp shadows of plant leaves on the table. And how the same sunlight allowed me to create a pensive self portrait on the wall. I noticed how in that shadowed self portrait I saw something of my mother. And how in a stack of old photos of her I saw so much of myself. I noticed how beautiful those images were to me scattered on the floor in the filtered sunlight, reminding me of a day alone in the woods, spring leaves scattered and overlapping above me, the sunlight filtering through.