Beauty Cleans the Mind
I am very excited to announce my upcoming book: Boston Road Trips (Globe Pequot Press), a travel guide uncovering unique destinations within short range of Boston, including some best-kept-secret locales in the city, featuring my photography and writing, due out in 2024. That’s a sentence I never imagined writing. Then again I never thought I’d live in a world where Kid Rock was invited to the White House. Isn’t life funny? I’m grateful for everyone’s support and looking forward to sharing updates and “first look” tidbits along the way!
“I mean, your pictures were always nice and everything, but it was like, flipping a switch and they were, like, wow, there’s something there, you know?” remarked Bob, my father-in-law. Bob is a careful thinker. He has that engineer mind, which means he’s wired to prize efficiency and squelch bullshit. He’s alarmingly good at both. Bob is not one of the “participation trophy” parenting generation so his praise is genuine, hard won, and highly coveted.
I nodded because I did know what he meant, but I couldn’t really explain it either. I always owned a camera. I always liked taking photos in a purely casual way. My first iPhone provided that immediacy that even a point-and-shoot digital camera lacked because the phone tech made pushing that image out into the world seamless. I was like so many other little digital lemmings who couldn’t wait to slap a grainy filter on a picture of some ivy crawling up a brick wall and wave it around on Instagram. Heady times. This was also in the sweet spot between a mostly ad-free Instagram and a Facebook that felt more like hanging out in the back of the class goofing around with people and less like it does now: the love child of The Hunger Games and Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome with coupon codes for The GAP. I started taking daily photographs and sharing them on social media because I discovered I enjoyed letting the pictures speak for me.
People seemed to like the images enough and that was satisfying, like taking a hot shower after a workout. It got the job done. Photography was not something I took very seriously as “a thing I could actually do.” People went to school for it; they logged hours in a dark room; they knew about shutter speeds and f-stops the way a chef knows how to julienne something. I never had a desire to take a class, though I did buy a “photography basics” type of book when I got my first “big girl” DSLR camera and thought “Uh-oh, I better know things about shutter speeds now.” Unlike just about everything constellating my life, photography was not something I wanted to take that seriously. But I think photography had other ideas.
I know. I typed and deleted that sentence four times because it sounds very ARTSY-WOO-WOO-EYE-ROLL-CRINGE-GIVE-ME-A-BREAK! And you may be thinking, “If she starts talking about goddamn muses, I am unsubscribing faster than it takes a toddler to change her mind.” I know.
Look, I’m not William Blake. He was the nineteenth-century British poet who claimed to have visions when he was as young as four, including a time when he saw “God put His head to the window,” which resulted in him screaming (natural response) and becoming a genius poet (less than natural response). I wish! Imagine having a very handy scapegoat for anything you did that stunk up the joint: “I don’t know what to tell you. God really didn’t come through for me on this one. I’m still getting paid, right?” What I’m saying is that I think creativity is everywhere all over the place in infinite forms just looking for outlets. Girl with camera is as good a place as any.
Then the pandemic happened. Everything got so quiet. Life felt as if it had been shrunk down to whatever you could carry on your back like a tortoise. Fear. Sadness. Anxiety. More quiet, that unnatural stillness like waiting for a snowstorm that never arrives. It would have been magical if it wasn’t also lethal. I walked-a lot. I went out every morning to exercise and sometimes again in the afternoon. I explored. I wandered through neighborhoods that I didn’t even know existed. I discovered what, to me, felt like hidden treasures in the form of walking paths along a stretch of river that I had never encountered and, in one instance, an entire nature preserve tucked inside one end of an urban bikeway.
During those weeks I was usually alone. A few times I walked down the middle of what used to be a busy street just because I could (I saw that in a movie, right before the minor key change kicked in and the zombies start schlumping out of the shadows). Few distractions. Everywhere I went, all this unexpected beauty appeared out of nowhere: the mirror reflection of a tree along the banks of a river, that first intrepid purple crocus of spring, foggy morning light filtering through bare branches. I photographed all of it, big gulps of shots. “Beauty cleans the mind,” wrote novelist Matt Haig. More, please, my brain croaked, parched for serenity and peace.
I posted images a few times a day as if it were my responsibility, which I think photography knew I’d always end up taking it seriously-YES THAT IS AN ARTSY-WOO-WOO THING! TOUGH NUGGETS. Nothing was okay, everything from baking bread to cleaning out the garage to cycling through the Lord of the Rings trilogy three times a week were band-aids, and we all knew it. But the world was not only still there, it remained with the kind of splendor that comes with seeing things for the first time or with such clarity that it’s impossible to keep looking at things the same way moving forward.
Or, like flipping a switch, and, like wow, there’s something there, you know?
I called it! Congrats. Always beautiful stuff. xo