I'm not afraid to fall in love with people. It helps me to see beauty that others might overlook. I actively look for ways to have the enthusiasm of a novice. I think in many ways that is the secret to my successful long-term love affair with creativity, photography, and Shewanders.
I love the beginning of falling in love. I like the word fall - the immersion of yourself in something. The way falling can feel thrilling, terrifying, soft meandering that feels like coming home, or a spinning that is full of delight.
My discovery of photography was both a springtime love affair and a profound sacred grounding.
I know that may sound Intense or grandiose but it was instant and I felt supported and in such a complete way that I thought:
“I may never speak again”
Language is important to me. It's how you hear and tell stories. It's how my inventive mind knew how to be seen.
What language took a backseat in my mind the moment I chose photography.
I was at my friend Amy’s house, and Jen and I were showing her images from our exchange program in England. I could see how easily she could understand our experience just by looking at a few images from our Payless throw away cameras.
I underplayed the moment, I said to my friends “Well people really understand photographs, clearly I could speak all day and not be as clear as these few images. There's so much less to say, that I might never have to say anything again.” I was seventeen. Seventeen year olds say all kinds of idiotic things, the only problem was that I knew I meant it. I knew I would tell all kinds of stories with my future images. Things I couldn’t put into words, things that I wanted to protect and cherish. Things that meant the world to me but I wouldn’t have to admit it out loud. I could tell so many kinds of stories and I could share them or keep them to myself. I had all the power in the world. At least the kind of power that I needed. The power to draw things as they are from my point of view and create physical, tangible objects that were evidence of the abstract things like joy or beauty or hope or someone mattering.
I wasn't alone anymore. I had my path. I could fall in love with photography over and over again.
I was a creative without a medium before this and I was so grateful to have found my creative playground. It was thrilling and extraordinary to take my first classes. To be a part of the tradition of photographers who made this their path too.
There was much to explore on this new path. A fascinating blend of characters to discover, new vantage points to see from as well as film, paper, and darkroom techniques. Stories, sequencing, Life magazine, The Migrant Mother, Harry Callahan’s images of Eleanor and New York City. Robert Mapplethorpe who proved you could say anything even before people were ready for it and me.
Me.
A seventeen year old blonde girl from a broken home who was very alone in this world and looked for beauty in the winter of 1993 when fog had rolled into the valley for months and the sky was bleak. I was looking for evidence that the world was redeemable. “Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health” was one one our few icons in Modesto, probably our only icon - and my teacher had shown us that someone had already taken that image so I needed to find my own icons and tell my own stories. I had already begun traveling the world, but I knew I wanted to photograph wherever I was and in the beginning I was in Modesto. George Lucas had been here and filmed American Graffiti. The West Coast Photographic Movement had been born all around me so, inevitably, I too could find my way in photography regardless of my surroundings.
What followed was everything else.
Black and White photography, Ilford FP4, and fiber based prints, alternative processes, begging my friends to model for me, talking all the classes, experimenting, finding my tribe, Suda House, SFAI, working a day job in advertising to buy film, eventually Shewanders and then decades later. Today.
Remembering that newness, that fresh perspective, and that total commitment to being myself and telling my stories is one of the best aspects of my life. Endlessly leaning on this medium for all that it has to offer and endlessly paying homage to it over and over and over again in a constant practice of gratitude for all that it has to offer and all that I have to offer.
It’s good to offer your life up to something.
I like the routine of us loving each other.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
