chasing a feeling — 

the why

Since I was in high school, I’ve been chasing a feeling. In 2010 when websites like Instagram and Tumblr and Flickr were first becoming popular, I spent hours online, combing through blogs and websites, just looking at photographs. I would sit in my bedroom late into the night scrolling through webpages studying the lives of people I had never met. Not the way social media is now. Blogs have a certain magic because they can be practically infinite. Sure you can scroll through a person’s Instagram profile, but photographers will post hundreds, thousands of photographs on their blogs from their portrait shoots or wedding weekends or even just their personal vacations. And more often than not, if you find the right photographer, each and every one of those photographs will inspire you to go out and make your own art. It’s a rush that has inspired me for years, and it has given me the drive to seek out a life and a business that’s worthy of blogging about.

It’s hard to explain what that time felt like, especially if you weren’t a part of that community, but looking back it felt like its own little renaissance. I witnessed dozens of girls around my own age sharing their lives through photographs, learning how to develop film, writing out their personal projects and stories just because they wanted to document their life and explore the craft of photography. Something about that culture really shaped me and that time of my life. I started pursuing film photography in high school, learning how to develop my own film and rediscovering my parents’ old analogue cameras. I would capture hundreds of photos of mundane family vacations, and take moody self-portraits with my DSLR in the backyard of our house. I wanted to prove that my life, as normal and boring as it was, could be just as important and visually pleasing as the girls I saw online with their kitschy bedrooms.

Now, over a decade later, I still think about those photographers when I’m documenting my own life. Many of them are people I continue to keep up with, some I’ve befriended, others I’ve rediscovered online through their newest pursuits, but all of them have made a lasting impact on my life, my business, and my art. They each taught me valuable things about how I want to capture the human experience.

Part of what originally drew me in to photography as a young child was the ability to capture raw moments on 35mm film and keep them alive. My mom always wanted to know why I was taking photos of every single random object I owned, but what fascinated me was the ability to document the world exactly as I saw it, conveyed on a piece of paper, on a plastic negative. Nevermind that the images meant nothing to Mom, nevermind that I was wasting money on images that we haven’t looked at in decades. What mattered was the act of thinking, “I want to hold this moment in my hands.”

To me, photography has always been about that unique magic. It allowed me the ability to romanticize my life, even when my life felt insignificant. By giving me a camera at a young age, my parents were saying, “Yes, your life is worthy of sharing. The way you see the world is important and we want to see things through your eyes.” And I’ll never stop being grateful to them for giving me that encouragement.

it’s about time —

One of my favorite films is About Time directed by Richard Curtis. There’s a scene specifically towards the end where the main character is talking about how he tries to appreciate even the most ordinary days of his life because there is value in the mundane, in the everyday, in the ordinary. The entire film stresses that even if you could magically relive your life or go back in time, chances are that you’ll appreciate it more if its finite, if you only get one chance to live.

The feeling I chase every time I try to photograph something is life. I want to capture life at its most authentic, its most mundane, and turn it into both a time capsule and a work of art. I want to capture the moments hidden in the background, the images you don’t think to ask for because surely you won’t need to remember this moment. But the truth is, you will want to remember every moment because every moment is a piece of the massive puzzle that is your life. The older we get, the more things slip away and I’m convinced that the only things that stand the test of time are the images we stockpile in boxes in our closets.

As photography has evolved in the time I’ve been alive, I’ve witnessed so many technological advances and changes. My childhood was documented on 35mm film, but I witnessed the rise of the digital camera. I grew up with my dad’s Pentax K1000 and my mom’s Sony Cybershot and my Nikon D3000. All of these technologies intermingle in my life and in my generation, and now we’re living in a time where my favorite photographers use both analogue film cameras and mirrorless beasts together. While years ago we were chasing megapixels and throwing out our old negatives in search of something more modern, now we want to capture life in every medium we can get our hands on. With the freedom to choose, we want to use medium as a new way to explore art and creation. We don’t have to be limited by Lightroom presets but we also don’t have to be limited by a 200 ISO. We get to have both, any, all.

You’d think with all these options it would overwhelming or unnecessary, but somehow it feels even more freeing than ever before. There are no limits to the art we can create. There are no limits to the moments we can capture. There are no limits to the infinite number of ways we can remember a single moment in time.