Introspective Photography: Self-awareness through photography.

For the next few weeks I will be posting exercises on photography and personal understanding. I would call this introspective photography. Just like journal writing, I believe that photography and the photos we choose to take can tell us a great deal about who we are. Being conscious of our photographic approach, our gaze, our ways of editing and how we feel about others' photographs is a great place to begin exploring the inner workings of our emotional state. I have always believed that contemplative photography can be a therapeutic tool to better self-awareness. Therefore, I am embarking on my own journey of self-exploration through introspective photography to see where this path leads me.

First exercise: Portrait of Absence

The house in which I live today was built by my grandparents in 1969, two years before I was born. It is a house that holds lifetimes of memories for myself and for those who have passed through it. But through the years, furniture has been moved around, some minor renovations have been done and the smell I used to associate with it is slowly being replaced by pets, teenagers and the 21st century.

Only last year did the house fully become mine. A generational passing that has left an imprint. In the journey to photograph my absence, my presence is needed first. To truly find myself in this house, I need to look outside the walls to those things that have not changed.

As a child I spent countless hours in the garden around the house. My grandfather, an enthusiastic gardener, planted a variety of fruit trees that provided us flavorful desserts. As a child, it was often me they sent with a bowl to hold whatever fruit they asked me to harvest. They could have sent me towards the plum trees, the peach tree, the grape vines, the fig tree, the apricot tree or the almond tree depending on the season. Of all the trees my grandfather planted, the only one left in the garden today is the almond tree. Barely there, it is fragile, aging, on the cusp. I recently had to cut off a dead side of it to allow the other half to live as the dying side was draining life from the entire tree. It was painful to do so, but it was necessary to keep it alive. I am not sure yet if it will live much longer. But at least it survived one more summer.

It seems to me that the only true representation of my absence in this house is the almond tree. It represents the child inside of me that was and still remains and the woman I became and am no longer. Both are present, but not quite there as they were before. The trajectory of life feels like a never-ending path of interconnected lines, weaving past and present together; a helix of intertwining memories and events, where this child and this woman can connect and speak and share secrets along the way.

Within the branches of the almond tree are the sensory echoes of my bare feet climbing upon it, reaching into the sky to grasp the farthest fruit. Beneath it lies the soft earth, holding its place and providing sustenance and security, enabling it to spread its branches and grow the leaves that sheltered me with their shade during the hot summer months. If I look at it long enough, I can see my grandmother shuffling around it to reach the clothesline where she dried her sheets. I envision my grandfather on the ladder trimming the branches, watering it during a dry spell. I can even see my mother tossing the ball back and forth with my son, laughing and running around the garden, seemingly unaffected by the 70-year age difference.

Its existence embraces my whole life. It knew me as a child, as a girl, as a woman and as a mother. And I have known it as a vibrant, lush, fruit bearing perennial.

The tree is about my age, exceeding the average almond tree's lifespan by more than 20 years. I watched it grow every year as we flew back and forth from the United States to France for summer vacation. Each year, a little taller, a little rounder, a little more fruitful until now. Today it is like me, older, vulnerable, shrinking, tired but determined to keep on enjoying what time is left. It is steady and strong and surviving. It remains for now but it knows time is limited. The end becomes more visible over a horizon that once felt infinitely distant.

I will hopefully outlive this almond tree. But we will have traveled a long path together and to photograph it as it is today, is to photograph my absence. When it retreats back into the earth, our paths will have diverged. And when I die there will be no almond tree to remember me.

Second Exercise: The Contemplative Gaze

This, to me, is the most natural exercise as I feel as though I am always contemplating my surroundings. The contemplative gaze is a reflective consideration of our surroundings and my  gaze gravitates towards anything that stands out…anything out of the ordinary. My iPhone is packed with photographs of little instants in the day like treasures to remember. I would like to think we all do this, but I have learned over time that not everyone is as visually aware of their surroundings.   

Maybe we communicate with the world in different ways.  My visual senses seem to be on high alert to any variation in color, form, placement, light or shadows. I find myself intrigued by these small details, focusing on them in a sort of meditative state. Little bubbles of pure presence. They are sustenance for the soul and even the most mundane objects can turn beautiful in the right light or under certain unexpected conditions.

Situational or environmental awareness are terms I wasn’t familiar with until more recently, but as I spend more time photographing the details that attract my attention I am  beginning to understand how much of a visual thinker I am and how this heightened sense of my surroundings has played a significant role in my life. I find the beauty in the simplest elements captivating.

An object as mundane as a bell sitting on a plastic chair will call my gaze towards it when the light falls in such a way to bring it to life. I can get lost in the exchange between the heavy metal and the plastic and how these two materials compose a visual symphony of shadows. To many people this probably sounds absurd as they’re unlikely to dwell on how that bell, perched on the seat's curve, creates a canvas of flowing lines. They may not even notice the bell at all. But, to me, it grabs me visually and I need to acknowledge it with a photograph as if to say, “this light and these shadows and this chair and this bell all existed in this moment in a beautiful mesmerizing dance on this earth.”

Taking a moment to notice what draws us in visually is an important step in self-awareness. What truly matters is not just contemplating the object of our visual interest, but reflecting on the act of gazing itself and what it reveals about us.  I recognize that my gaze was formed in my walks through the forest around my house during my childhood. Being hyper-vigilant about my surroundings and attuned to any inconsistencies proved to be a life-saving quality. I believe I’ve carried this alertness with me throughout my life and when it is not busy saving me, it is reminding me to be present and notice the details.

Third Exercise: The Expressionist Gaze

This exercise was difficult.

I don’t know if I’ve just been so busy or if I’ve been finding all sorts of ways to avoid it, but it took me quite a while to get here.

Expressionist art often makes use of abstract and distorted forms to paint or express emotions. In photography this can be done in camera or in the digital or chemical darkroom.

For this exercise, I decided to create an image by revisiting my archives. It felt like reaching into my own memory to retrieve a feeling, then finding a way to bring that emotion back into the present moment through visual expression.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve been dragging several feelings around with me. They are feelings of struggle, fear, strength and loss.

When my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2015, 7 years after my father died, we didn’t panic. We were told that Parkinson’s wasn’t a death sentence and although it would be difficult the medication worked very well and it would keep the symptoms at bay for quite some time. Unfortunately that wasn’t the way things panned out. Fairly quickly we came to understand that her Parkinson’s was atypical, considered a “parksinsonian” disease but never fully diagnosed. The initial symptom that led her to see the neurologist was a sudden change in her handwriting. All her letters would become smaller and smaller as they traveled across the page and she had no control over it. Fairly quickly other symptoms began to appear and the most debilitating for her was the slowness and rigidity. For a very hyperactive, independent woman whose passion was being out in the world…traveling, shopping, attending cultural events and tending to her garden…this literal brake was a nightmare scenario for her. A woman always in control who hated the idea of depending on someone suddenly found herself vulnerable and limited and looking to me, her only child, to help her navigate this new reality.

At this point it felt like a journey we were both embarking on. She as the passenger, and I as the driver. We were already very close, best friends in many ways, but this was not the direction we expected to take. We were veering off course into unknown territory.

The photograph represents not only the physical pain she endured, but the psychological struggle she and I both experienced at the loss of her autonomy. Like any death, the first stage involved denial but that didn’t last long as the symptoms made it real very quickly. Then for several years she got stuck in a cycle of anger and hope. She was angry at her body, angry at her lack of independence, but hopeful that new technologies, research and her abundance of physical activity might slow the onset of muscle stiffness and stave off the creeping shadow of dementia. In those moments of weakness, she often directed her frustration at me. These were by far the hardest years for me. Watching her cry uncontrollably at the loss she was experiencing. I felt a mix of empathy, frustration, powerlessness and impatience. I hated to hear her cry. Hated it. As an empath, I absorbed all her psychological pain and felt it deep within my bones. I wanted to help her, to ease the burden, so I remained by her side, a constant presence in her pain. In the beginning this reversal of our roles did not sit easily with her. She feared being controlled and did everything in her power to defy my recommendations and rules.

In 2017, she took the car keys and left the house on her own when she should not have been driving. As I was teaching a class that afternoon, I kept receiving call after call, both from her number and an unidentified one. I waited until class was over to check my messages but I didn’t even have a chance before I received another call from a bank manager telling me that my mother had fallen near her car and the car had rolled over her. She was on her way to the hospital in an ambulance and there was no more he could tell me. A few minutes later, I got a call from my mother who sounded surprisingly calm. She described being knocked down by the wind while getting into the car and the car rolling onto her leg. She reassured me that she was ok and stopped my mind from panicking. I told her I’d meet her at the hospital and called my husband to drive me there because I was too emotional to get behind the wheel. We found her, afraid and in shock. The doctors said she had compartment syndrome impeding all blood flow in her leg. My mother who did not want her leg to be amputated agreed to a a fasciotomy that would take almost 6 months to fully heal.

That was the beginning of our new life.

“Sutures” represents my personal journey as my mother’s caregiver. From that moment on we went from one emergency to the next. Several falls that required stitching and stapling. Head traumas and even an episode of septic shock that almost took her from me. Years that blurred into a relentless cycle of medical appointments and panicked phone calls. Days on end of crying and confusion. Packing and moving while trying to keep life as normal as possible. It was exhausting, draining, sad, demoralizing. I tried to be a good mom to my son, a decent wife and partner to my husband and grow a career that never felt it had a chance. My mother’s health issues had filled 80% of my headspace and demanded constant physical contact.

Twelve days from today will mark a year since my mother died. Exactly one year ago I was telling her that our paths would soon diverge. She was no longer able to eat and we knew where we were heading. Luckily, the dementia we feared never fully set in. She lost short term memory, but it had no effect on recognizing people or remembering her past relationships. She remained fully herself in her mind until the very end and those final ten days with her were a gift. Facing the approaching end with clarity and acceptance allowed us both to embrace a sense of control and find peace together.

“Sutures” sits on the horizon of two worlds. The before and the after, stitching them together into a new whole...a single life, divided and scarred, yet somehow mended—transformed by the act of healing. There are the physical sutures on my mother’s body and the invisible ones imprinted deep within my mind, now slowly healing. Each stitch a reminder of the wounds we've both carried.