project 52 / week 52 / time
Exhale. Turn back the clock.
17 February 2025
Incoming Message: I have another prompt for you if you want one.
Outgoing Message: Send it
Incoming Message: Time. A photo is just a snapshot in time, yet it shows so much. And while that photo is being taken, whether a happy or sad one, the world keeps spinning. People are living their lives. Good and bad things are still happening. Yet we never seem to have enough time. If anyone can try and capture the essence of time, it’s going to be you. Now I fully recognize this is not easy, however I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
Outgoing Message: You are good at this. It’s so hard. I’ll try!
So on February 17th, I started building. Thoughts on time? I have many. But this prompt came from a past photo student who gave me the first prompt idea for project 52. And she explains it so well. If I thought capturing what photography means to me (week 1) was hard, this… shakes head.
My original idea for 52/52 was to create a metamorphic photo, showcasing how I’ve changed but…once she floated the idea of time. I knew it should be the bookend. There is comfortable symmetry in that, starting and ending with one person’s thoughts. Starting on what photography means to me and ending with time. We like poetry ‘round these parts.
So let’s go back.
project 52 / week 1 / capture what photography means to you. Damn. That one took a lot of thinking. I love that photo. It’s exactly right, paired with the right song.
Project 52 became highly personal to me. It became so much more than 52 photos a week. I thought it was going to be so easy, one photo a week. Surely, less demanding than a photo a day. I was wrong, and don’t call me Shirley. Sometimes the weekly photo took all day long to create: set up, shooting, editing, and then came the writing. These photos were meant to have a bigger narrative attached, a story, cinematic. I wanted to focus on that, “visual storytelling,” but somehow my brain got that confused with writing. And so I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. And I pried opened this door I had painted shut. The paint peeled, the air rushed in and the words went flooding out.
There are 11 photos within this photograph. I was shooting for 52 but it became too much. Since February, I’ve been photographing the sky and the color changes it produces with this end photo in mind.
52/52 // time
Time. Fragments of it, all cut up and spliced together between power lines. Strips sliding past each other, pulling apart, layer by layer. The power line, standing in, like structure and routine. Time holds rhythm. The days keep showing up, the calendar flips, the clock strikes 00:00, and so on. But here, there are blended layers of time woven into the sky. Multiple moments coexisting. There’s order. There’s chaos. It holds all things. It is the in-between, the beginning, middle, and the end. It flows from one boundary to another. Control and release. Side by side. The essence of time.
Project 52 comes to its rightful end.
Thanks for playing.
For all time, always.
Oh, hey, on week one, I told you to find the thing, that feels like everything. So, in this time of project 52, did you find your thing? Find the thing that fills the spot in your chest? I did, several times, and lost it too. It felt like everything. I still can’t explain it. I just felt it. I let it consume me. I let it drive my life, did you? On week one, I told you to listen to this song: rite of spring by angels & airwaves.
”If I had a chance for another try, I wouldn’t change a thing, it’s made me all who I am inside. And if could thank god that I am here and that I am alive. And every day I wake, I tell myself a little harmless lie: the whole wide world is mine.”
If you want to know what this feels like…being at the end of project 52, being all these different versions of myself, finding and losing different parts of myself, trying to make it all fit and then letting it not fit…listen to this song: a little’s enough by angels & airwaves. Secret #17: This song, has been my through-line since I was 16.
“I, I can do anything
If you want me here
Yeah, I can fix anything
If you let me near
Where are those secrets now
That you're too scared to tell?
I'd whisper them all aloud
So you can hear yourself”