Studio Reflection - November 2024

Growing as an artist and a spiral journey.

I am beginning to feel the slowness of the season, the way that the frost preserves the world at first light, the cold that stiffens my muscles and makes me reluctant to leave my bed in the morning, the shortened days that feel almost like dawn and twilight meet each other around 1pm. My body carries this season as a heavy weight, though I have already noticed that my willingness to lean into deeper moments of stillness has shifted my relationship to these darker days. I am delighting in allowing the daylight to dictate my days and shorten the time I spend at my computer, somehow encouraging my often wandering mind to focus on the priorities I have for this season. Cozy nights with a cup of tea have felt extraordinary, and I am learning to appreciate the darkness as much as I yearn for light.

My creativity tends to shift in winter, becoming less focused on producing work and more directed at reviewing the year and making plans for the future. My main project this month has been reworking my website, which I hope to relaunch next month. While I typically don’t enjoy the process of updating my website, this time around I have been appreciative of the time it has allowed me to spend with the work I’ve produced over the past few years. 

Seeing and recognizing my own growth as an artist is something I struggle to do at times. When I was in college, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted my images to look like, and was frustrated when I couldn’t achieve an aesthetic quality that I admired in other photographers. I was also interested in nearly every style of photography. When my professors would talk about a “voice,” I knew that I had things that I wanted to say, but struggled with the idea of narrowing the scope of my photography.

Over the past few years, I have felt that voice develop to the point that I trust the images that I make, which has felt entirely freeing in my practice. Rather than being worried if the subject matter that I am interested in fits with a certain aesthetic, I trust that the way that I photograph is influenced by the perspective I bring to my craft and will be reflective of that perspective.

Much of developing that voice came with practice. I usually photograph several times a week, even if it is just on my walks up and down my road, even if no one else sees the photographs. Through practice, and particularly embodied practice, the way that I photograph has become more personal in its aesthetic, containing influences from those I admire and those who are close to me, but ultimately reflecting the way I perceive and experience the world.

Being active in an artistic community and showing up once a week to gather around photography has also been instrumental in the growth I’ve seen over the past few years. Practicing alongside photographers in Kinship Photography Collective has and continues to expand my photographic ability. Many productivity writers speak about how consistent low effort yields exceptional results, and I think being committed to continuously sharing work, listening to others share their work, and creating new work has brought my photographic practice into a place I never thought I would reach. I’m not speaking as much to the quality of the images, though I am delighted by many of the images I make, but rather the way that photography has been entirely fulfilling in my life.

While I’ve been photographing in earnest for nearly 15 years now, I’ve sometimes had a strained relationship to my craft. In undergraduate I frequently questioned my direction, knowing that I had a more fine art leaning practice, yet yearning for a career in commercial photography-something that I thought would grant me the financial stability I wanted from a photography career. Then, as I realized I needed to figure out a way for documentary and fine art work to exist in my life, and that I had limited energy as a chronically ill person with which to attempt a career, I put a lot of pressure on my work to sustain me.

When I became more acutely ill in 2019, photography became a tool of survival, a way of expressing that which felt trapped behind closed doors and beneath my skin, a form of expression in which I could practice reconnecting to a disembodied self. Then, when I joined the founding team of Life at Six Feet in 2020 and was meeting at least once a week with photographers to make work responding to the collective experience of the pandemic, I remembered why I ever picked up a camera in the first place.

I began photographing because I was curious about the world around me and because I wanted to understand my place in it. I’ve always desired deep connection from photographing, photography being a way I reach outward to connect with the world around me. I aim to work relationally, which is why I often photograph the places closest to my own heart. Being in a photographic community has shown me ways to explore those deep connections that I’ve craved in my life.

Over time, photography has become enmeshed with the way I relate to my own body, and through that relationship how I, as a body, relate to the world. Drawing closer to my own body has brought me into a more intimate photographic practice in the ways that I see my body influencing the images I make.

My eyesight has changed significantly over my mid-20s in a way that is difficult to describe. When I developed a chronic migraine disorder in 2022 that manifests in a rare type of migraine that can last for weeks, if not a month or more, my eyes became even more sensitive to the light than they had been before. I am a person who craves a dimly lit room, which may be another reason that winter this year feels more comforting than years prior. 

I can see the ways my vision has changed, the increased photosensitivity and the way that colors can often feel more vibrant, bordering on nauseating, reflected in my photography. I sometimes wonder to myself if my eyesight changed my photography, or the photography changed my eyesight, for they feel so interlinked. Whether this is just a story I tell myself or there is a grain of truth in it, it is an example of the way that photography has become integral in my life.

Beyond the actual practice of making photographs, my creative voice has been shaped and formed by the writers I read, particularly those working in Disability and Environmental Justice movements. There was a radical reshaping of my world perspective during Covid, as I think many people experienced, and for me, it was motivated by trying to understand my own body’s place in the world, particularly as someone acknowledging the way chronic illness had permanently changed that body, and what it means to have a body that intimately knows the impermanence of “health” in a pandemic world. 

This intersected with my coming out as trans non-binary/gender fluid. For me, my sense of gender is tied to the dynamic ways my body shows up in the world. I have a profound relationship with instability, a knowledge that how things are today are rarely how they will be tomorrow. A single photograph is perceived as static, multiple photographs share a more dynamic view through multiple static moments. Something in photography gives me the stability in my life that I need to feel balanced, mentally and emotionally.

My body’s inability to fill the role of “able-bodied” does not feel like an inadequacy, but rather an expansion of how a body can exist. Reading authors from Disability Justice like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Eli Clare (among many, many others), and Ecological studies like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Ed Yong (among many, many others), introduced this idea of expanding what a body is beyond the conventional definition of what a body is supposed to be able to do, what it looks like, and even what relationships it has.

That’s what my experience of gender feels like, an expansion of gender, a slippery, indescribable, felt sense of moving through the world in a way that invites confusion, celebrates curiosity, and helps me move deeper into a body that experiences the world in a way that is deemed medically “different” from other bodies. Photography has been a tool to not only understand my experience of gender, but of exploring experiences that I struggle to put language to. Like my experience of gender and illness within my body, photography allows me to hold many sometimes contradictory realities at once with care.

Even in just reflecting within this post, I’m seeing how coming into a truer accord with my own sense of self has brought that creative voice into congruence with my creative practice. I was once criticized as an undergraduate that my work was too personal, that no one outside of the people in my photographs would “care” about what I was trying to say with my work. I’ve since leaned into that personal perspective, feeling the weight of the perspectives that create the context for my work. In that way, I feel a responsibility in my work, not only in making photographs that are true to my values and ethics, but in recognizing the ways that who I am influences the work and the ways the work is perceived.

Practicing alongside others in a photographic community in Kinship Photography Collective has also somewhat decentered the self in my work (as a self portrait artist!? stick with me). In Kinship, we pose a question that is at the center of the community, and everyone contributes their own voice to describe some aspect of that question. It allows for a holistic view of a question, even if it is still only a partial answer, because the view focuses on the group as a whole rather than individuals. Similarly, I’ve felt my work shift from a focus on self identity to a relational identity. I’m less interested in figuring myself out than I am in the web of relationships in which we all participate, which I experience through my body.

Our theme at Kinship this year was Between Bodies, and working with that theme really brought me into the questions that are central to my practice. I feel like now, at the end of this year, I am working deeper with and closer to the themes I want to continue during this phase of my life. I keep returning to questions like “how can photography increase care and connection?” and “how can photography reveal the interconnected nature of things?” 

This month, I have felt a lot of cycles close in my life. It has been a hard fall personally and collectively. Yet even in the frail light of November there is a tremble of hope in the thin air that carries my work forward, that reminds me that as cycles end, cycles begin. We move forward on the spiral, returning to places that feel the same, yet are different. 

I returned to Glendale, SC recently on one of my trips to Spartanburg to visit my partner, and sat in a thin place for as long as my frozen fingers would allow. Lawson’s Creek breathed mist into a gossamer dawn, and there was a quiet that I’ve rarely experienced at Glendale Shoals, the surrounding neighborhoods not quite awake at sunrise. In photographing, I found myself making images that I felt profound attachment to, and found myself in the conundrum of having returned to make images to finish a project, only to realize that the images I was making felt entirely different than the work I made in my artist residency 8 months before. What I thought might be the end of a cycle might actually be the beginning of one.

Something I always forget that I enjoy is photographing alongside others. My practice is often a solitary one, even if I bring photographs to conversations with others. When I am photographing, I tend to be alone, lost in my bodymind as I sort through what I am experiencing. This past weekend I went to “How do we mark the flood?” on the Warren Wilson campus with my friend Kaoly Gutierrez (a fantastic photographer) and brought my camera along.

I can often feel self conscious photographing in public, like a vulnerable self is being revealed, yet this event was full of artists and photographers creating a community full of warmth even in the cold night. It was moving. In making images, I felt like I was participating in the moment, witnessing in an event that was in part about witnessing. However briefly I was there (I am not made for the cold), I felt grateful to have brought my camera, to carry these moments with me.

WNC is still recovering. Here are some places that have been doing incredible work on the ground: Beloved Asheville and Roar WNC have also been active organizations distributing supplies, volunteering, and in general being community hubs during this time. Nanostead has been continuously supporting clean-up efforts in Marshall, the town that I live closest to which was completely flooded by the French Broad River.

Well, this has been a long reflection, indicative of the reflective state I am in (and the amount of caffeine I’ve had while I’ve written this). Next month I will be doing a year-long studio review that is both celebratory and reflective to round out 2025. Stay well!