The month since my last post has been trying - a beginning, in order to re-examine my understanding of self and identity, of comfort and love, of all those things I take for granted, sorrow and joy. A friend once told 
me that he believed there were only two true emotions: joy and sorrow. I'm not sure I believe that, I'm not sure that he would say he does either, but there is something beautiful to me about that statement: that we reside somewhere on that spectrum, dangling somewhere between the two. Both are indecipherable; I lack the ability to clearly know where I am on that spectrum, at least until reflecting back on memories. How intangible and deceiving memory so often is. I find it easier to look back on a period of time as if it were something other than it was in that moment, as if who I am now changes what was then.
Photographs are equally deceiving: they alter the memory of place, time, sound with a two-dimensional representation. A photograph needs to capture pieces of that experience that aren't there, may never even have been. What it then communicates is of course inherently different than the experience; it's instead the reflection of what we as observers bring to it. We infer our own joy or sorrow, sound, smell, and fury.It occurred to me recently, while hiking around for a job, something that is so easy to overlook but I think
necessary to better communicate a sense of place through a photograph. It's easy for me to be walking along a trail, a city street, a country road, and not turn around or simply veer from the direction that I'm heading. It's simple, and still, easy to forget that everything has a new face from another vantage point. Hunkering low to the ground, climbing up a fire escape, changing a portrait's angle, new light lingering on brick, a mountain ridge coupled by a withered tree; these things bring new stories. You veer off the trail and the same subject tells you something new.
Winter seems like a good time for me to turn around and gain a new perspective. It's easier to pause in the cold, turn around, take in something different than what I would expect. Rather than trying to capture images as I expect them, or clarify where I am on some arbitrary spectrum, this winter I need to try new things, make myself uncomfortable, see and experience a bit differently: personally, professionally, photographically.
