🍂 photos as a means to autonomy and desire 🍂
🍂 photos as a means to autonomy and desire 🍂
why i stopped and started again, a neighborhood photo walk, & thoughts from our visit to los angeles
A Prescript: Finding or noting quotes for the sign-off of these emails is a small joy in my life. This one tickles me to no end, so make sure you make it to the end.
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It is 6:49am and I am sitting at my patio table in the back garden which has begun sloping at some point recently. It is a crisp 44° and I am in my favorite sweatpants, hoodie, and with the coffee that is made faithfully for me every morning for the last 13 years. The bright yellow fig leaves are dropping, every dahlia plant lays horizontal, and the blueberry bushes are bright red. The sunrise is still low over the east fence and I can hear a chipmunk rustling somewhere in the leaves.
I abandoned the garden this year for the first time, quite fully, and I am looking around reveling in how our own spaces are mirrors of how we care for ourselves. This time, it is painful. I do not go far down this path because I hold tightly to the understanding that we live in a post-capitalist crisis where my generation is required to overwork and we do not get the little luxuries of time and place that the generation did before us — but still, I suppose there are ways I could have sat with myself this year and I did not.
I stopped writing this summer also after a combination of health issues and overwork hit me. In June I began attempting to make some subtle shifts in my perspective to veer myself away from the desire to be ‘productive’ and in late September I noticed it must have been effective because I started making real decisions to simplify my life and projects, and found acceptance in the possibility of letting others down. I most certainly did let people down, and I move through this discomfort now at the gym while I prioritize not letting myself down.
We visited Los Angeles last week and it felt like the glorious, celebratory end to whatever transformation has been at work deep inside me this year.
To go home and see how much I have changed since being away, and how this change contributes to my own joy and experience in a place. To know that there is a place on the other side of this country where I do feel fully myself and I can return there when I need, to be re-connected to that iteration of myself after so long. This is a new possibility in my life and I revel in it also.
I had a brief conversation with an old friend there about how not taking photos or writing this year has affected me, and this seed of a realization has wormed itself deeply into my mind over the last 7 days. I would like to write about it now.
Photos As A Means To Autonomy
I was given my first camera at age 9 and I was an avid journal-er since then as well.
Documenting my life has always been a joy and perhaps a way for the self to say, What I see and feel is real! Here we all are! Look at this! This is important and interesting to me! In the midst of everything, I am!
Autonomy is the great precursor to connection - and with an erosion of autonomy, I think connection wanes or is not truly felt. Being able to write and validate what you see, hear, feel, are some of our greatest tools for growing into ourselves. For finding safety, finding expression, peace, sovereignty. All of these parts of being human.
Observing and documenting are other names for witnessing.
To witness oneself is painful when you have not been present much in your own life, but to witness oneself when you have? It is quite possibly the greatest joy I have ever felt.
The stakes are high for witnessing your life.
I have had two major traumas around this gifted experience: The first was my dad reading my diary and making me feel like any words I put down will always be read and that there is no true private place. To this day sometimes when I write, I hedge, to protect myself even from me. The second was the entire last decade of social media, where the joy of documenting our individual experiences became competitive, commercialized, and worst of all — for a large sum of others, not ourselves and our friends.
Terrible things happen to us over the course of our lives and it is the miracle of the human spirit to re-invent and ascribe new meaning. Perhaps we need more rituals around burying the things that die in ourselves so that it is easier to welcome in new ways of being.
Photos As A Means To Romanticization & Desire
My resistance against the external pressures of the world is returning to witness my own life. When everything is big, study the small.
When I came home from LA the very first thing I did was pick up my camera and walk around my neighborhood and return to the practice of noticing my life.
If you have read any of Esther Perel’s work around the problem of monogamy and long term relationships, she posits that Love [to understand and ‘have’ fully] and Desire [mystery and the ‘wanting’ of something separate, unknown, or absent from yourself] are at odds with each other, which is why so many of us experience a death to eroticism or a waning sex life over time.
Desire is something requiring attention and cultivation. It is the mental act of creating separateness and looking at another person with the awareness that we do not truly know them. Desire requires awareness that there is always mystery. It is dangerous to move through our days as if our partner is an extension of ourselves and to confuse familiarity with sameness or possession. She also posits that when people cheat, it is to feel alive. Which is meaning to say, to feel desire for a mystery or something we do not know well.
Are not vacations like little cheats on our life?
It occurred to me that photography and writing are the two greatest tools we have to create* desire in our own lives. [*I am not even sure we are ‘creating’ it. It is more like practicing allowing something that wants to exist, to exist — by taking a step back from the fault of the human mind.]
To find the romance in the moments we are so very familiar with. To see them again with new eyes and to create a ‘separateness’ where we can experience ourselves or the people in our lives as others experience us. As they really are.
I have thoroughly convinced myself this morning that taking photos and writing (both privately and publicly) are The Perfect Hobbies — as they bring us to ourselves and that they also create desire for our own seemingly monotonous lives.
An Invitation to Re-invent Photography
Perhaps we should be grateful that it is the easiest it has ever been to document the world around us with our phones and affordable cameras, and easier than it has ever been to share these with others with social media and texting. But, I think a lot about how valuable the physical photos that I have of relatives and my childhood are, and how invaluable the 50,000 photos in my iPhone are.
Maybe you’ve felt a greater autonomy and more romanticization of your life over the years as a result. In a very large sense, I have. I think iPhones and social media have done wonders for the self-realization of those who are naturally creator and sharer types. But in the daily sense, I do not feel this, and I would like to.
Now that I have a better understanding of the purpose of photos in my life, I think one of my efforts for 2025 will be shooting more for this newsletter and printing more for my home.
This is not an ad but if you also want to do the same, Artifact Uprising has long been a favorite way to send iPhone photos to be printed, or to publish photo books for the home. I stopped doing this several years ago, but the couple of photo books I have are among my prized possessions!
Personally I would love to stop hating on Instagram, go back to enjoying taking photos, and enjoy having a little digital documentation of my year. I also would love to hear anyone else’s revelations on this topic of the erosion of documentation and how we can take it back for ourselves.
Time to go take another photo walk,
Lauren 🍂
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” — Henry David Thoreau