Hello friends, and a very Happy New Year!

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m not at all sad that December is over. As much as I wish I loved the holidays, the truth is I do not. The month just always feels so chaotic and rushed and fraught with expectation. So much expectation. I do my best to carve out some quiet moments to enjoy, but mostly I just find myself holding my breath and hoping not to be noticed.

For some reason this one felt particularly disjointed to me. I spent most of the month feeling like my brain was in a fog; unable to articulate my thoughts or focus on what it was I was trying to do. Generally when I sit down to put together this letter I can look back at the month and see a cohesiveness in my images and thoughts and writing; I can tell where I was trying to go and see that I more or less got there (or missed completely and changed direction, but it at least feels like a legible map with information on it). But this month the only thing that seems to be cohesive about any of my work is the incongruence of it all.

But if you’ve been here with me for very long then you probably know what I’m about to say; despite being someone who really appreciates and strives for order - I want so badly to make sense of everything - I am also someone who tries to just accept what is.

And so here we are. As I write this I’m sitting in my studio, in the dark, the only light a colorful string of Edison bulbs. My youngest is sitting behind me in my desk chair, petting my back and nuzzling me with his face, while opera plays in the background. If you can picture that, then perhaps you’ll have an idea of where I’m coming from this month.

Truly, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and that your first day of 2023 has been a beautiful one. Thanks so much to each of you for being here another year! And as always I love to hear from you, so write me back!

kg

RECENT FILM WORK

This month I made a lot of pictures, and didn’t realize until I sat down to put this letter together that I had not once picked up either of my big digital cameras. Seven rolls of film made, nine developed, and overall I was pretty happy with the way each roll came out. Other than needing to work out some kinks with my scanning process I feel like I’m starting to actually get the hang of this. Since film seems to be where my focus is resting these days I decided to make a few changes to my website, removing my previous little play page (the meadow) and putting my recent film work front and center. I’ve had fun treating it as my open space for putting images together, rearranging, taking out old images, adding some that are new or newly (re)discovered. I’m not really keeping it chronological and instead just playing with the space, allowing it to be a visual representation of where I am at the moment rather than a record of where I’ve been. I expect it will be a page I update often, something that’s more a constant work in flux than an endpoint I’m building toward.

THE FLOODED FOREST

December almost always finds me wading through my darkest waters, and this one was no exception. Maybe it’s the diminishing daylight, or the need to find a little peace in the chaos of the month. These are the days that I crave the darkness and the solitude of the woods the most, and lately it’s been these particular woods. There is a wildness and a wantonness to this space in winter that is intoxicating, much of the forest floor flooded, the air thick with fog. It feels feral and forgotten, untamed and unrestrained, and it seems to mirror my own winter mood perfectly.

RECENT BLOG POSTS

LOOKING MORE DEEPLY

If you’ve had a conversation with me anytime in the last few years about Instagram, the attention economy, and the effect that they’ve had on photography (or life in general really) then you know one of my chief complaints is that it has trained us all to evaluate an image (or an artwork, idea, people even) in mere seconds. So habituated are we to instantly heart, favorite, skip, share, or swipe right; to judge without really considering what’s in front of us in any meaningful way.

When I first pulled this image up on my screen after scanning I kept looking at it; it was a bit mesmerizing, but there was something off about it too. It took me a moment to realize what it was, but when I did I fought my inclination to fix it and decided it was perfect exactly as it was. I liked that it made me look a little more deeply. And frankly it’s a pretty good visual depiction of what December felt like.

AT THE MOMENT

LISTENING TO

My listening has been as fragmented and disordered as everything else in my life this month, but if there’s been one album most consistent in the rotation it’s probably Leif Vollebekk’s Inland. I mentioned him a couple of months ago as his Twin Solitude is my autumn go-to, reminding me of days spent playing in the Blue Ridge. But shortly after I discovered that album I moved back to explore his older records; Inland was the one that kept me warm all winter long.

READING IN

For a month that already seemed to be careening toward entropy, I probably didn’t do myself any favors as far as input; where I generally spend my time consuming things that sooth and inspire me I spent much of this month working on Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur and Don DeLillo’s White Noise. If you’re familiar with these books then you know what I mean; jumbled, discordant, a little bizarre. Both have been great, and in fact White Noise is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time (which is a big statement for someone who, as a general rule, doesn’t enjoy fiction one bit.) If you’re up for leaning into chaos then I highly recommend it; it’s a little dark, but also very, very funny, and gives the reader lots to think about along the way.

THINKING ABOUT

I came across the podcast Interesting People Reading Poetry quite by accident, but I’ve been thinking about the episode that features Alec Soth reading Wallace Stevens ( Spotify / Apple ) ever since. It’s a short but wonderful little meditation on the correlation between photography and poetry, and Soth touches on so many of the things I feel about making my own work.

CRUSHING ON

The internet can be an annoying place, but occasionally it can also be full of wonderful rabbit holes for one to run down. What started as a quick search for a synonym for petrichor led me to an article about how words enter language. It mentioned John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a book I have a copy of but had totally forgotten. If you aren’t familiar it is a collection of invented words, each representing an attempt to articulate an idea or a feeling for which there is currently no English equivalent. I had forgotten just how much I love that little book, and how perfectly succinct some of the words seem to be. One of my favorites:

vellichor n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Thanks again for reading! And one more for the road: old film, new film…