42/52 // i went to this spot for a little bird. and it was here that i put it together in my mind, waiting for the literal light. i strung together all that would be fading soon.

42/52 // this photo has never felt like mine. and i was right, about all of it.

42/52 // i thought this photo was a dud when i took it but when i look at it now, it’s like what it feels like to no longer be homesick. “…’a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all,’ merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness.” that’s what i think it feels like when the “homesick” feeling goes away. so photo kids, this is why i tell you not to delete photos on your camera, upload them, keep them, revisit them, because after a day, a week, a month, or many, you might see something you missed in that tiny lcd screen.

42/52 // i don’t think i like this photo very much but there’s something about the way the light crests on the hill. if you don’t look, you won’t see.

49/52 // this photo felt like the most honest one i’d taken in awhile. and to go back to 2024, it gave me the chest tingly thing to post it, so i know it was true and right to do so, no matter how scary.

7/52 // i take this picture every year. and usually keep it for myself. except for the year of *“nothin’ but time”* and this year I guess.

Without much thought, I dove into project 365, on January 1st, 2024. Which, was actually 366 because lemon life (TM) and leap year… And I figured out a lot of things through that process of finding a photograph every single day. Finding, stumbling upon, searching for, creating. I listened, I watched, I waited, I set it up. The coolest thing about 365 was each photograph holds an exact moment of the day that I can instantly recall when I look at it. What was said, what I felt, the things I did and didn’t do… It’s all there, a visual journal of an entire year. [This is why I highly recommend you attempt it, at least once in your life]. As much pressure as it was, it’s maybe one of the best things I’ve ever done. I said it from the start, it was like a vitamin, one-a-day. It gave me something that I had lost. And I’m glad to have found that thing again.

Switching to a photo a week for 2025, rather than a day, was denser. Less photos, but…the photos felt like they needed to carry more weight than those of 366/2024. They needed a narrative. I set a tone and I aimed to achieve it. A photo a week is nothing like a photo a day… It slowed down time. It wasn’t about visually appealing images, (I mean, it still was, duh) but it was about saying something more. So I threw out any caution and went deeper. And it was really hard. I wanted to quit, a lot. Half way through, I stopped photographing for the weekly “prompt” and started creating the images first, finding a prompt to fit them later. And maybe that’s cheating, or maybe that’s just backward design. Whatever you want to call it, I think it made me a better artist, a better writer, a better thinker.

As an artist there’s about a million battles to fight, and one of the biggest and longest you’ll fight is fear. There are many fruitless fights against different types of fears and many of them, don’t really matter…The big one is keeping the line open. To search, to find, to make, even when you’re not sure the world wants to see it, even when you’re scared to show it, even when you’re not really sure what it is you’ve created. And it’s sort of beautiful and awful and wonderful and painful. My other big fear: losing things. The idea of not seeing, the idea of not knowing, not remembering, not keeping...scares me too much. I have to keep the things that matter, forever, in whatever ways they can be kept:

like photographs on this blog,
words on scraps of paper, in journals,
ticket stubs folded into the pages of said journals,
a little jar with vincent’s toenails in my cupboard,
the receipt from the restaurant tucked behind a picture in a frame,
the scrap of paper with my grandmother’s handwriting next her perfume in the linen closet,
the last drawing I made you resting in my junk drawer,
the stickers on the envelop from my mother stuck to the side of my fridge,
a screenshot of a story of two trees intertwining sent by my dad at 3:02 a.m. in a folder on my hard drive,
the starfish anklet my niece made in the back of my make-up drawer,
all have to kept.

I am the keeper of things. While photographing in 2024, I kept some photos to myself. Some days, I took a photo that I didn’t want anyone to see, I wanted to keep it, just for me to have. And so I shot more that day and came up with something else to post. I did the same this year for project 52/2025. I held on to photographs and didn’t post them. I wanted them for me. So in going back through my 52/2025 folder, I found a few that feel like they should’ve been seen.

There’s only one week left of project 52, and it’s really just a couple of days, because this year will end on a Wednesday. So in thinking of that, in trying to grow, I took a look back through project 52 and found a few photos I was holding on to that you didn’t see. This isn’t all of them, change doesn’t happen overnight but I suppose it nudges the needle a little. Forever, with a war of worlds inside me, these are the photos you didn’t see.

So, for the last time in 2025, I guess I’ll see you next week.