I have this collection of photos on my Flickr called "growth." It's basically all the photos I took from the time I got a camera when I was 14 to the time right before I entered college and took a formal photography class. I think that point--me entering college and leaving home for the first time--kind of marked a future of self-consciousness in myself and my work. Before then, I made what I felt without too much thought. Since then, it hasn't been that way. I think I have created moments that harken back to the purity I had before that point, but so much of what I have made and lived recently has felt very calculated. I have loved some of my work I've made in the past few years. But the photos I took as a teenager are so much more poignant. I don't know if they are that way to a viewer other than myself. I think it's my own memories that make them so meaningful. Each photo from that time...I remember what the air felt like that day, what song I had stuck in my head, which boy I liked. They bring back days that have a certain color to describe them rather than a word.
And so many of them were taken for my blog. I had a blog when I was 15 called "Oh, Bother". I miss those days of blogging. It wasn't the commercial show that blogging is now. I felt like then we were a bunch of young girls who, yes, liked fashion and posted outfits, but also dealt out honesty much more frequently than the blogging community does now. And it wasn't even honesty in a blunt way. It was just us recording our feelings and what happened in our little lives. We were searching for connection with each other more than exposure in the big bad world of fashion or commercialism or whatever this is.
Anyways. What I'm saying is I miss the honesty. I miss the rawness of my photos from high school. They aren't even "good photos". But I am so deeply in love with them and how I completely allowed myself to feel the things that I felt when I took those pictures.
I don't know, maybe I will make a book of these photos just for myself. All I really want is to go back inside of them.
I don't know, maybe I will make a book of these photos just for myself. All I really want is to go back inside of them.
