“I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost – that is important.” -Jacques-Henri Lartigue
I’m sitting in my old bedroom at my mom’s house listening to the welcome sound of rain beating down, and I’m scrapping any plans for going out with my camera this morning (lest it lets up and I can run outside with my magnifying glass and scare the neighbors as I lay on the ground or in the bushes doing weird things with my camera). The cracks in the dry earth around here were beginning to open wide enough to fall through (not literally, but…) and this rain is like a huge sigh of relief for all life. I might just go and run through it for kicks. When I get stuck out in the rain, I like to throw my hands up in the sky and yell in my head, “Universe, baptize me!” I welcome it all.
Anyway, there are a few times that I’m doing something where I feel most present, including making a paper cutting and hitting the outdoors with my camera. I love the desolation of gravel roads, but there’s also plenty to look at even in my backyard. Having my camera allows me without effort to be totally in the now and observant, constantly searching for things to look at more closely and to record. It also gives me another avenue to be creative.
It lets me become part of my environment. I don’t feel like an outsider taking a picture. I feel like I’m inside, connecting with everything around me.
I feel like when I’m looking as closely as I do with my camera, I can really connect to the spirit of the trees or flowers or rocks or animals or whatever it is I’m photographing.
The more closely and deeply I look, the more there is to find..
“Where there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.” -Dorthea Lange