i once knew a girl in the years of my youth, with eyes like the summer...

okay, i've been a bad blogger. Its been well over a week since I last said i would post regularly. To be honest, work has been so ridiculously crazy busy in this christmas rush that I've had no time to slack off and write blogs. So rather than berate myself for it, I'm going to post another photo to talk about. Actually, I'm posting two. I had another photo in mind, but yesterday I saw different one and it got me to thinking.
I live on a farm in the city and it is beautiful. My front yard leads out to the paved city street while my backyard stretches out into fields of flax and wheat and tree lined gravel walks. I like wandering out along the gravel road behind my house because the trees are dramatic. Dark black trunks against the greens and browns and oranges of the earth and the wiry black branches so stark against the western sky. I love it. And I take lots of photos out there because the sunset always looks so beautiful out there. I took this one earlier last month. Just home from traveling for months, glad to be resting in the places i love best here in edmonton, but also leaving pieces of me spread across everywhere I'd been.




This is a photo I've taken 100 times, but every time the sun turns a certain colour of gold, or the shadows stretch out to a specific length, or the trees look a particular shade of impossible dark, I feel compelled to shot it again. and again. and again. Each time its a different moment for me. Its different from the last time I took the shot, because I am different. Its always interesting for me to see this image again and again because to me, the moment is always changing. I know something about the photo that no one else does. I know what I was doing before I went to shoot, I know what I was thinking about, I know what I was trying not to think about, I know what I was wanting and needing from life in that moment. I know all these things that are so intrinsically linked to that specific photo for me, that any other viewer would never guess at.

Which is why, when I see this same moment through someone else's eyes, it catches me off guard.



Patrick took this photo yesterday while I was at work. It's strange to see this moment and know it so well and know my own experience in it and then see his and wonder about what was going through his mind. Where he had been before he went out to shoot. What it was that called him out of the warm house into -30 degrees to capture this.

It reminds me that every image has so much more inside of it than we are every able to know. The complexity of someone attempting to capture their own experience is incredible.