Inner Landscapes: Thin Places & People's Faces
Below is an essay I wrote on January 22, 2021, with some light edits. I’m sharing it here for a few reasons: 1) it’s an essay I shared in my previous blog space that I want in this new space because it’s important to me; 2) over two years later, I still feel these words with my whole being. Everything I said is true, even after making a decision to shift my full time work from portraiture to nature and landscape; and 3) I have more thoughts about this, particularly after recent experiences, that I hope to share in a forthcoming post and that are related to this essay.
Just before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020, I started writing an essay about why I would choose to make portraits even if I had the opportunity to work as a nature photographer full time. I’m a wild, nature-loving introvert who carves out time in my schedule to go backpacking alone for weeks at a time, so it likely wouldn’t surprise many people if at some point I just ran off to the mountains and never came back. But there’s something about portraiture that always kept my feet trekking back to the studio. Now, almost a year after starting that essay, I’ve struggled to finish a once hypothetical statement that suddenly became non-hypothetical. As it’s done for many around the world, the pandemic forced me to have a reckoning with myself about what I do and why I do it.
I’m still new to being a full time photographer. 2020 was my third year. In an ordinary year, if there is such a thing, I divide my time between portraits and nature work, with portraiture providing the bulk of my gross annual income. That changed in 2020. As my community grappled with the effects of the virus along with the rest of the world, my portrait studio sat empty and I shifted my focus to selling fine art nature prints to a wider audience online. When nonessential businesses were closed, my third-party printer closed. I invested my first economic stimulus check in a wide format printer so that I could keep working, printing and shipping orders from my home. My portrait studio, which is a roughly 150-square-foot room in my rental back house, which isn’t much bigger as a whole, was adjusted to accommodate the changes. I cleared space on the built-in wall shelving to place the new printer, and I brought in a folding table for the paper cutter I use to trim prints. I rolled up my backdrops and put them away, and I permanently left the dog’s bed in their place. By October, I’d only made a handful of portraits, I’d rescued a second dog, and I was spending far more time outside than in my studio. With the significant loss of work, I had plenty of time to begin doubting that I was really a portrait photographer anyway, and I forged ahead with new plans. And then I rediscovered the draft copy of my unfinished essay.
It started like this:
As a photographer who works in both portraiture and landscapes, I often find myself contemplating the similarities in my approach to the two. As a fiercely introverted person, I have sometimes wondered what stops me from leaving the former to engage solely in the latter. No doubt I would be content to spend the majority of my days and nights in wild places, off the beaten path, away from crowds of people and heavy traffic. It is in such places that I experience so much of the world’s beauty and moments of clarity that continue to define my life. Many of these places I would call thin places, where “the visible and the invisible,” as poet John O’Donohue put it, “intertwine in human experience.” And yet, wilderness areas are not the only places where I experience this kind of thinness.
And yet… and yet.
For me, thin places can materialize in a portrait studio just as profoundly as they might at Croagh Patrick, or the Rongbuk Monastery, or along The Colorado Trail. For me, a thin place isn’t just a physical place. It’s a metaphysical one. It’s the experience of being in between worlds and seeing what’s possible there. It’s the moment somebody closes their eyes and they’re neither here nor there, being or unbeing. It’s a sacred space in my studio where all of the stories that surround us fall away and what remains is a beautiful face, part shadow, part light, that is neither friend nor foe, good nor bad, but a human being who desires and is deserving of love. And in that moment, when I press the shutter button on my camera, that love is all I see.
That’s what a portrait is to me.
[End of original essay]
If you click here and listen to Kae Tempest’s performance of People’s Faces while you look at my portraits below, it may better express where I’m coming from.
It was never about the photography.
