Studio Reflection - August 2024

Late summer and returning to my practice.

I never knew so many shades of green until I moved to southern Appalachia. The mountains have a nuanced way of speaking the months, from the timid lightness of spring, to the voracious explosion of green summer, to the more recent subtle fading of green to signal the first whispers of fall. The wind carries a cool note even during this week of savage heat, and I’ve started waking up at 4am to pull a blanket over my body.

I am feeling the shifts of seasons more acutely this year. I have always been cognizant of my reaction to the transition between seasons, the way that a few weeks of unsettled, wavering weather typically sets my body into a panic. This year, it seems that the seasons are shifting things beyond my body within my life. I spent much of the summer away from my computer, away from photo work, and yet within the past couple of weeks my emails have become alive, I’ve been working with clients again, and feel a yearning to engage in my work again.

There was a day this month where I felt called to make self portraits, even. It was early in the month, and possibly the only day where I went out specifically to make images. I was carrying a lot of anger with me that day, having had to do medical administration and managing uncomfortable symptoms. Over the course of making photographs, I was reminded just how important the act of sitting and being with the camera and whatever experience I was having is to my mental health.

The resulting images moved from yelling underwater to a return to baptismal imagery. Yesterday, while sitting in the same spot as the images, up to my neck in river, I thought of how sacred that water felt to me, that there was something inescapably more than myself in the current tugging at my sides. The light just hangs on everything in that river valley, the gold of afternoon pooling against stone and glinting off water.