Yearning

01 Nov Yearning

I photograph out of a need, a necessity, a deep yearning to safely be together.

It’s a given that photography is going to give you plenty of alone time to search, seek, contemplate and study this Universe around us, but the nugget, the true gift to the photographer is that it’s gift, a safe time to be together.

You have to listen for it. To be ready to embrace it, accept it and move into it, but it’s there. It’s really two moments for me:  that split second of time where the photo is both taken by me and given by the subject and that lingering later viewed time when I can look and know that I was there.

The photograph not only gives me that scene, that subject, that thing, but it also gives me that implied space around it that I consumed. I was there to give without requiring return. I was loving without concern to be loved. I was being together in the most pure way that I could—filling a hole and requiring no part of another to do that for me. I was bringing a sense of wholeness to not only myself, but also returning it to the world. In my photos you’ll see considered light, composition and form, but mostly you’ll see, safely, what it is I’m feeling at that very moment.

I am together with Ria, as a partner in life and Jen, as a friend, in the deepest and safest sense I could have ever imagined. Do I bat a thousand? Hardly, but it’s true, it’s honest, it’s real— it’s love. A love I can only give, or receive, because of those thousands of moments I spend 1/200th of a second at a time, processing all that I am.