for a while i made and shared a photo each day. words and light reflected. and then i stopped. it didn't feel right. for me, the photo a day project was about distilling the essence of and recording a moment in time. but things started to feel too big, too raw, too complex. i felt that there was no way to water down my experience of any moment into one image and a mouthful of words. there was so much that i couldn't begin to explain, that i couldn't make sense of on my own. fully embracing, let alone sharing, any of it felt entirely overwhelming.
it's likely i would have stopped sooner, but a visit to habit pulled me through may. immediately thereafter i put the camera away.
a few nights ago, cristina garcia's words in dreaming in cuban struck me, shedding light on my experience, helping me understand the feeling that i couldn't put into my own words:
memory cannot be confined, celia realizes, looking out the kitchen window to the sea. it's slate gray, the color of undeveloped film. capturing images suddenly seems to her an act of cruelty. it was an atrocity to sell cameras at el encanto department store, to imprision emotions on squares of glossy paper.
i put the camera down at a time when too much was moving for me to feel comfortable with working the f-stop, with creating a static image, with labeling it with a reflection. the frame of a photograph felt restrictive at a time when i needed, more than anything, to experience expansiveness. the inherent confinement of images mirrored the constriction i felt in my ribcage. i simply could not continue.
i recently decided to step back in. the return has been gradual. i look over these months away and see how the dots connect back to now. i've shifted focus, and feel like i'm still working the dials, honing in on the image. not all adjustments have been made. what i'm finding as i pick up the camera, is that i now know that life is truly a work in progress. it's never finished, and always continuing to unfold. it's an amalgamation of many parts. there's beauty and grace and nuance in these little bits, and these deserve to be celebrated.
another important piece for me is a realization about the power of a photograph. i love that a single image can bring me back to the entirety of an experience. this is apparent again and again as i peek into the rear-view mirror of my life in pictures. i can smell the new scent of her milky breath those first days, can hear the awed exhalation i made when the valley revealed itself through the fog, can feel the wind hit our faces as we turned back to avoid a protective mama and her nest of goslings, can taste the sweetness of sunkissed orbs as i stood barefoot in the afternoon light, and can see that the way that i see things inspires others to take a look for themselves through their own lenses.
my new intent is not to capture images, but use photography and words to highlight facets of the whole while honoring the uncontained, unbounded, indescribable nature of things. to look outward while looking inward. this practice grounds me. brings me into the present. and too, it creates a little archive that invariably helps me understand the larger process through which i am walking, a process that is sometimes impossible to see while i'm trudging through the thick of it. my revived day to day, 2011 flickr set is here.
(i'm similarly ruminating on blogging, but those ideas are not quite ready to emerge. plus, it's late. soon.)
as always, thanks to you my friends for reading, for witnessing.
