Pick Me Up

Gonna be honest....

One of the things I don't like about photography and social media is the tendency to create a highlight effect - makes it look like the person has everything figured out. It's called "picture perfect" for a reason. And as a photographer, I find it challenging to ride the line between capturing the light and capturing the dark, metaphorically and literally. My point is, today was shitty. Well, today, yesterday, and Monday were all pretty shitty. I spent some time on social media after a week detox and it got my brain all revved up again and I loss my sense of well-being that was at a low bass hum last week.

The pictures below are all pictures that I took last month. But what was my frame of mind? Was I having fun? If I hadn't planted doubt in your mind, would you have scrolled these and thought, "damn, she lives the perfect life"? That's the thing about photos. And I think that's why I like including narrative with them, as I am now and as I have been with #frontstepproject and #covidstories. I don't want to be just another photographer, selling my artistic eye for pictures on the wall. The stories are so important. We are more than our photos. Our photos are our creations... how we see the world around us. Ape art.

Anyways, I didn't know what the point of this blog was until now. I wonder what it would be like to capture more darkness with my camera. Tell more stories about the shadows of living. To take out my camera and capture the depression I see around me when I am inundated in it. There's something about that that gives me a sense of control over my life. We can't control a lot of things, but we can name them. We can capture them in images and express them through art.

So with that said, here are a few arbitrary images I took in April, a month, among many recently, where I have been living with a low bass hum of darkness in this stressful pandemic environment.