On attention.

My desire to be a writer often supersedes my desire to actually write. It's been about a year since I launched this newsletter, and I'm still unsure what exactly I'm doing here. Who am I to be a writer anyway? Why should anyone listen to what I have to say?

Valid questions, I suppose. 

That said, I’ve been here before. The desire to write while also being a photographer is reminiscent of my desire to be a photographer while also being a musician. In a sense, I have always struggled with photography because I always felt like I didn’t truly belong here. I was a music guy, and always had been. I hate to bang the ‘imposter syndrome’ drum again, but I think there was some truth behind those feelings. I was self conscious of holding a camera because, in my mind, everyone expected me to be holding a guitar. 

I first launched this project as a means to reduce my dependence on social media. I figured I would try to lean into the SEO world and hope to generate traffic to my business that way. While I have primarily been shooting weddings the last few years, I didn’t want this to be a typical wedding photography blog where I use ‘whimsical’ buzzwords to describe the most ‘intimate’ or ‘fairytale-like’ day of someone else’s life for the benefit of my own business. I wanted to write about things that were important to me, but to somehow tie them back to how I view weddings, or to my process of documenting them.

Still, I feel there was some dishonesty there. Writing felt forced. There was pressure to get something written and sent out each month even if I didn’t have much to say. In a sense this website, this newsletter, was still being reduced to a form of content creation as a means to prop up something other than the art itself. I want to move beyond that.

I am finding that I have a desire to experience the world more fully than I have before, and I’d like for whatever it is that I create to reflect that. I want to pay attention to the world around me, and to think of that attention, as the French philosopher Simone Weil would suggest, as a pure form of generosity. I want to resist the pull of certainty and to experience whatever the universe throws at me without imposing my personal biases and beliefs onto them beforehand. What if, just maybe, I don’t actually know everything?

I may not ever find myself in a position to travel the world and experience things first hand, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t still experience them. About one mile from my home there is a public library containing books about any topic I could think of, written by people with a litany of different lived experiences than my own. The person washing windows a mere 30 feet from me at the time of this writing is of a different nationality than me, and could probably teach me a lot about his family and heritage if I would simply ask about it. The trees that I am looking at outside of the office window where I am writing this in Atlanta drink the same rain water from the same clouds in the same sky as the trees in the rainforests of Sumatra. The same wind that blows the sand across the Saharan Desert is the same wind that blows the pecans off of my neighbor’s tree and into my yard. The same sun that melts the frozen rivers of Alaska in early spring is the same sun that shows mercy to the Australian outback at dusk. 

Maybe everything really is connected in some sort of mystical sense, and all we have to do is pay attention and be aware of that fact. Maybe I need to photograph less so I can be present more. Maybe I need to write less so that I can listen more. Maybe this is a pure form of generosity that I can offer, and maybe its from this generosity where purposeful art originates.

Thanks for reading! Hope you're taking care of yourself and those around you!