ellie ✈ musgrave

Photographer, writer. 2017 Pratt Photo graduate. Toto fan. 

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Listening to Dr. Dog and hoping things get easier soon.

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Two things happened this week: my boss told me that I am not, in fact, “taking pictures of nothing,” and I submitted to an online exhibition that required I write a project statement. So here is the current iteration of what I’d say I’m working on.

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This is an ongoing series of work dealing with subject matters such as memory, loss, and uncertainty.

These images depict the stage in which I take everything off the wall and reapply what actually matters, in which I pull out all the weeds. This is the stage in which I tread alongside trepidation, hanging by a thread over despondency. I often have nightmares of events out of my control, events for which I’m never physically involved - I only hear about them secondhand. This disquiet is mirrored by the inevitable variables behind the practice of film photography, specifically in the photographs taken miles away from where I live, of subjects not accessible in my day-to-day life.

I regain calm in the minutiae of these seemingly dull moments. I use my conscious artistry to abate my subconscious anxieties: setting aside an extra moment to take in how the wind moves the branches of the tree in front of the house I grew up in, the divots in the road, the sunlight through my nephew’s hair. These images are tremors along the muscle I am exercising in defiance of a perceived lack of control.

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Found this while looking through the vault today. This is Kensington, Maryland, in March 2016.

Feeling all sorts of out-of-place. This time of year makes me think of myself when I was 17, makes me think of myself when I was 21 (when I took this). The clouds shift and a sunny morning becomes overcast, I think back to days like this, I get lost in the swell of dead pine leaves from the autumn past. I spent two hours clearing out dead leaves from the bradford pear in my backyard, I cut myself on a rusty nail (I have had a tetanus booster recently, I’m fine), I shoveled moldy leaves into a bag and told myself the amount of cat shit I was touching was acceptable. Yesterday I got a light sunburn from being outdoors for long enough.

I talked to someone recently about pictures and it came to me that most of my photographs are taken outside. Is this significant? While I was shoveling yard waste yesterday I likened it to my mental state, I’ve been clearing out shit, all I do is collect shit and it swirls around in my head (or my backyard) and at some point all the shit, even the useful stuff, becomes useless, and I have to shovel it all out. Cue the Rick and Morty line about Summer getting her shit together. My therapist assigned me (I know) to at least come up with three ways to dig myself out of my rut. I shoveled my backyard, I bought a new plant, I looked up free/cheap yoga classes in the city. I thoroughly avoided buying new shoes, I ate some vegetables. I’m trying. All I can do is try.

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2019 and 2016, respectively.

I wrote last week about how Julie and I had a long talk about my work. She said I’m just doing the same thing as what my thesis was, and that that’s “my work,” and by that token it’s kind of inescapable. She wasn’t saying that to deride what I did with my thesis; what was happening was I was denying that that’s what I was doing, and she was calling me on my bullshit. 

And I can’t blame her! Look at these two color palettes. Of all things, Facebook showed me the image from 2016 in my memories. I was printing for a class, very possibly Julie’s, and took a screenshot of my color test. Just this week I had to re-learn how to large-scale print, for work, and boy was it a process, but still simple to pick back up. It made me think of my work on paper, how I just explained to someone that the majority of the work I do is viewed on the web, and how annoyed that made me! I might send some photos out to Shutterfly (or a site like it) and get 4x6 prints back so I can hold them, have a physical interaction with them, take the time to really look.

So I went into some images I’ve made in the past two years, today, and pulled these samples that are in the first image. I didn’t feel like organizing by color, but I did feel like curating some parts of some images. I’ve been doing screenshot details of images I’ve made lately at 100%. This is just pulling a strip from the top to the bottom edge of each image. But, good lord, if what I’m doing doesn’t look similar, in at least some ways. Being analytical like this sometimes clear the space for less straightforward thoughts. I wrote a poem before this, today, and in order to get started I had to write about what I wanted to write about. So this is me, writing what I want to photograph, and how I want to explain it. 

When I was printing work this week, I remembered the postcard-sized images I made in my junior year. Those translated into some of the black and white images in my Big Empty project- when I went back to places I’d made 35mm black and white photographs and used a medium format camera there, they turned into (some of) my thesis images. Not having had the finality of saying “here is my project” since then, and knowing that I really am doing some of the same things I was when I made that work, I have to harken back to it. I want to have that finality again, but I feel like my work needs to be more cohesive before I can do that.

I’m going back to shooting 35mm now, though. The format irritates me but it still feels more fluid, simpler. There’s something about wrapping my 35mm camera strap around my wrist and carrying it around as an extension. A physical interaction with my artwork! I feel like this is a silly notion to anyone who doesn’t make art that has to be processed the way (film) photography does, I bet I sound like a lunatic. When you draw or paint or sculpt, physicality is a given- your body takes the shape of your artwork. I try to do that with my pictures, too, but it’s not always as simple as positioning oneself. I leaned over a chain-link fence to take a picture of a riverside creek, last weekend, and yesterday Caiti and I went down to Valentino Pier and felt the good kind of pre-spring wind that makes me want to go back every afternoon. Maybe sometimes it’s about the work having a physical interaction with you, whipping your hair back, making you brace yourself for it - whatever it may be.

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It’s 3pm on a Sunday. I am on an Amtrak train back to NY from a weekend in Virginia. It’s been a long weekend that has simultaneously felt extremely short, and I don’t feel ready to go back. I miss everyone already, my heart is heavy and I have still yet to get over this discomfort with goodbyes.

In between the last time I wrote and now, I had a birthday. I turned 24 on a day that began bitterly cold in Brooklyn and ended up being somewhat temperate by the time I walked home from the train at 10pm. I had friends out for sushi that evening, I called my sister, I called my uncle, I called my mom and dad. A few nights later more friends took me out drinking at Duff’s in Williamsburg. I was plied with good food all week and was reminded of how loved I am, and part of that was a mini-vacation the following weekend (ending today) to hang out with my sister Caroline, her husband Ryan, my sister Sarah and her two boys, at Caroline and Ryan’s house in Richmond.

Thursday was a dreary and kind of woozy day, the train ride down took forever (or felt like it did) and I finally landed at my sister Caroline’s around 10pm. She made me soup, and we sat around her dining room table, small but fitting for just the three of us. The soup was thick with celery and herbs and felt like the most nourishing thing I’d had in weeks, and I slept well that night.

I came to Virginia kind of sick and got sicker on Friday. The weather was rainy Friday and Sunday, but very nice on Saturday. Friday I was meant to get a tattoo from Katie Davis, a local artist who I’ve wanted to have a piece done by for years. My first tattoo was done by her husband, Fred Pinckard, at Salvation Tattoo in Richmond where they both work. I follow both of them on Instagram and realized I could take an extra day for this weekend trip and get a tattoo done by Katie. I was going to get a deer tattooed on the other side of my body from where Fred’s tattoo was done- hers would be on the outside of my left thigh. The deer was meant to be an homage to my time in the UK. Friday I spent most of the day throwing up, with some kind of stomach bug, so I had to cancel my appointment, which I made a month out. I felt awful about it.

My hope is to come back and get it done, but I think what I’m so disappointed about is that I don’t know for sure when I’ll be back. Train tickets are expensive, my budget is tight enough as it is, and I can’t really justify taking time and money to go do it. If circumstances were different I’d probably stay another night or so in RVA and get the tattoo done, but I’m still in such a transitional period (read: broke) that a $70 train ticket isn’t something I can shrug off. Maybe in a few months I’ll feel differently, but missing out on this session (after I’d set aside time and money!) because I was sick was a huge bummer.

So was missing out on a lot of things I wanted to do in the UK because I was sick, frankly, and so is not feeling like I have the money or time to go to a doctor (if that would even help?) and figure out what I need to do to not get sick as often as I do. I don’t want it to become a trend, I don’t want to have a weak stomach- but how much money and time do people waste in denial about medical conditions? How much time and money to people waste, in general? Am I wasting time and money by staying in New York?

Unclear, not the point. Now that I’ve done enough complaining: 

The weekend was great as soon as my sister Sarah and my two nephews Nate and Eli, arrived at Caroline’s house. We sat around and played card games and I ate some rice and felt better, slowly. I woke up the next day feeling much better, though still tried to take it easy- maybe I’ve learned my lesson with overcompensating from a sick day. Sarah let me drive her Subaru to bowling, and I paid a cash toll for the first time, tossing the coins in a big silver basket coming out of the booth. The second time around I missed it (I’m publishing this on my blog, Jesus) and Sarah scrambled out of the car and picked up all of the coins I dropped for us to be able to get going. I ended up winning the second round of bowling, Ryan made us spectacular spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, we watched the 2018 Robin Hood movie and everyone just sat around, comfortably watching a movie, which I was taking part in for the first time in what felt like a long time. I am feeling tears prick at the backs of my eyes thinking about it.

And I got to go out and photograph under the Nickel Bridge in Richmond. I took Caroline’s car and drove less than two miles from their house to this park connected to a boarded-up pump house, and walked out on the towpath along the river for a while. It was cold enough to want for a jacket, but I didn’t need my coat. (I feel like I’ve been wearing a winter coat for eight goddamn years.) I leaned over a chain link fence and trespassed over CSX property and breathed in crisp pre-spring air and felt my feet sink deeper into the ground, and it felt freeing. Shooting 35mm and feeling free, in Virginia, is how I started taking the pictures I take now, and every time I do it I feel like I need to do it ten times over.

Caiti mentioned my feeling sad was about growing up, maybe growing away from my family more than I’m comfortable with. I said, if I’m growing up why do I still feel like a dumb kid? Does anybody ever really figure out how to balance this shit? I worry that my family feels that I’m aloof and inaccessible because I chose to live in New York. The truth is I don’t have the resources to put up more than one person, and my apartment is small enough that my family members (almost all of whom are older) would still feel cramped. I wanted to move away from the DC area, and wanted to avoid going to a community college, or taking a gap year, or embracing the unknown, when I moved to New York: I didn’t want to move away from my family, but that’s what I ended up doing, and now I have a life in New York and they have lives elsewhere.

And that’s okay! I’ve had important growth since then, and learned important lessons, and honestly having made a life for oneself (anywhere!) is a goddamn challenge, no matter who you are. I grant this. I trust myself, I trust my choices, but it’s hard when it feels like sometimes I’m turning my back on people who do things like scoop up coins from the road for me, or who get me a whole cake a week after my birthday so I still have candles to blow out, or who give me the last of their awesome homemade soup (even if I did reject it the following day), to pursue my own path and make my own choices and be my own person, somewhere that feels so far away.

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Part of this is sadness that I’ve been denying my own narrative, under the pretenses of furthering others’. Right? It’s probably time I got serious about what I wanted, if I’m having the feeling that I don’t want what I have.

I had simple wants and needs when I started looking for a new job: I wanted free time without sacrificing decent pay, I wanted to be able to skip town every once in a while without getting into trouble or missing out on anything. (To be fair- two of my favorite standup comedians did shows in New York while I’ve been out of town.) I needed to take care of myself and not feel so irreparably sad all the time. I don’t think my wants or needs have changed much- just my ability to pay attention to them.

Our train is pulling through DC currently, in a minute I’ll look out the window and see Silver Spring. I went to Book Thug Nation in Williamsburg a couple of weeks back, spoke to the cashier at length about the store and the neighborhood since I’d never been before. It turns out he grew up maybe a mile away from where I did, in Silver Spring, home to many, beloved by few. We’ve now veered away and are plugging away through Hyattsville but I’m still stuck thinking about that conversation, where we talked about not feeling okay calling ourselves New Yorkers, even though that’s what all our family and friends from Maryland felt like we were. My parents often call me that, and I don’t mind, but it feels like a lie. We’re pulling through the suburbs just below Baltimore and the ground is already dusted with snow- it feels just shy of cruel- which is me being melodramatic. I just don’t want to claim this snow as mine.

I’m thinking about how terrified I was to move home and stop making work after college. The new work I’ve been doing, I decided recently (after a come-to-jesus with Julie over a mountain of nachos and some other very important dialogue), is about my impetus to keep making work after school. It’s about determination and willfulness and the urge to keep doing, to keep going. I’m doing it subconsciously but I’m doing it, mostly in places that aren’t where I live.

In some ways, I wonder if I’m honoring the places I’m from, the places I leave part of myself every time I leave, by bringing it back to New York and actually MAKING the work here. I don’t have an Imacon in Maryland or Virginia, it’s not like I would have guaranteed access to anything if I moved; I couldn’t even find somewhere that sold film south of New York, much less a place that develops it, without charging a huge markup. I made the choices I made not because they were wrong or right, but because they were my choices to make, and given the circumstances I was when I made them, I think I chose wisely. In this practice, though, I need the escape as much as I need to return to the fold. I was writing a few weeks ago about longing, and how longing leads to searching, and how, usually, if you search stringently enough, if you sift through enough dirt, you find something good. I’m still searching, and it’s a laborious process- but I have rewards. I have tangible evidence that I’ve made work and continued the patterns that are good for me (and dropped some that aren’t), which is what I wanted.

And I still want it- I think a casualty of that is feeling sad I can’t spend all my time in one place for too long without getting an itch to leave. I loved traveling. I will do more of it. I’ll also come back to the places I’m from more. I wanted to promise this with a tattoo, but I don’t need a tattoo to promise myself that. (Though I still want it, goddamn it.) I want it to be enough to promise myself something. While I was asleep an old friend texted me and asked what my goals were for this year: I think that’s a decent one.

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This photo needs something. What, I’m not quite sure.

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Real sick of hearing about how backwater and shitty the state of Virginia is.

Below is what I wrote about Virginia, the day after the Charlottesville/UVA alt-right protest in 2017:

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The state of Virginia holds a special place in my heart. My dad grew up in Tidewater. I spent nine of my childhood summers at a camp across the James River from Colonial Williamsburg, one of the only places I've felt God or anything like it. A handful of my favorite people live there today, chiefly my sisters Caroline and Sarah. There are many more reasons that it's my favorite place to photograph, to make art.

Hearing what happened to Charlottesville yesterday unfortunately did not shock me. It terrifies me to know that Virginia is being heralded by white nationalists as "the capital of the Confederacy," and that they and other hate groups are using this logic to desecrate a place I love, but I'm not shocked. I am aware that this, too, is "my Virginia." Our nation alleges it was built on liberty, but it was built on exclusionary pretenses that only serve folks who look like the nationalists who marched yesterday. The same dirt I long to dig my toes into when New York overwhelms me has been tread by racists for hundreds of years. I do not share their values, but we share a country, and yesterday was not a surprise.

I've never been good at sharing, and I have no tolerance for hate. Both of my parents lived through the 1960s; the fact that, in so many ways, history is repeating itself, does a disservice to my generation and theirs. What happened yesterday was an abomination, and every fiber of my being disagrees with the hatred that seeks to defile my favorite place. Racism is part of Virginia's history-- but it does not have to be part of its future. Yesterday happened because of decades of refusal to denounce racist values. Liberty and hate do not go hand-in-hand. Condemn exclusivity, condemn hatred. They are not neighbors you have to love.

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I don't know if it was this New York Post headline that struck a nerve with me this morning, or this article this afternoon, but I have been feeling really sad about people not from Virginia railing against it.

Virginia is incredibly important to me, as an artist. I have made an unimaginable amount of work there over the past four years and every time I look at photos I've taken there they make me want to go back. My ties to the state run deep and I really hope I can bring some kind of positivity back to a place that I love dearly. As with the rest of the country, Virginia has a racist, sexist, and largely abominable past. Media like what I linked to above, while displaying abominable behavior, doesn't do the salvageable parts of the state justice. I don't want to start anything, but I feel like saying Virginia is a shitty place is extreme, plastering stereotypes on parts of the country you don't live in doesn't make your part of the country better, and being louder about what you disagree with someone else about doesn't make you more right-- it just feeds into divisiveness, polarization, and hate.

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A 35mm photograph from a sunnier (but not much warmer) day in San Francisco. An admonition to myself to scan the film I have (20 rolls). A momentary pause, a reminder to get out of bed and make memories worth looking back on.

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It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that I have had trouble writing about the trip I returned from last week, but I’m surprised. I think today was the first day that I could categorically calm down, settle in, and have a good think about the first twenty days of 2019. Yesterday I tried to hand-wash a wool sweater I bought new before my trip, and it mostly worked, but if you put your nose in it, it still smells like Irish cigarettes. There might be a metaphor there.

I chronicled my adventures when I got to Glasgow, my second-to-last city. I might write part of them here sometime. In the middle of my trip I hit a lull and got sick, and had to obey my body’s requests for a good chunk of the time that I was traveling. My friend Dan says he also gets sick when he travels; my mom swears I got “travel tummy,” which would be cute despite the actualities of what it entailed. I am fine, today-- though my trip has changed my perspectives on drinking more than somewhat.

But! I enjoyed myself. I have a handful of photos from the Ricoh that I’ll share sporadically until I get my film photos processed. Last I checked I shot 12 of the 15 rolls I brought with me. I also somehow have five rolls from my trip home for Christmas. And still film in my fridge to shoot. A subtle resolution is to not run out of film again. This whole paragraph makes me smile.

Some things I learned:

-Always carry Benadryl, Imodium, and Advil when traveling, because where you are going may not have them. Also, baking soda is called bicarbonate of soda in the UK. Never figured that one out.

-There are Trump supporters in countries besides the US. I spoke to one such man in Dublin on my last night, who called CNN “The Cartoon News Network,” who has a strong theory that the earth is flat. This man I met, while misled, had distinctive reasons to feel entitled to his opinions, and though I left more deeply entrenched in my own, it made me realize how blinkered I have been. There are people like that all over New York. I have largely curated my understanding of the world around me and that’s a bit twisted. 

-During my trip to the Cliffs of Moher, someone slipped and fell off the face of a cliff. I didn’t see it happen, but the police were there and someone from my tour group ended up being a witness. When I toured the Highlands a week later, I left my flat-soled sneakers at the hostel and wore my hiking boots instead. 

-The historic Abbey Road zebra crossing is strikingly unexciting, and is an active street. unless you have someone to take your picture. My uncle Nick wants to get one of our whole family crossing at once.

-When you return from a two-week trip full of things you’ve never seen before, New York will open your eyes to its inconsistencies all over again. Every bus I took in Ireland and the UK had free wifi and outlets; the SBS in New York is only starting to catch up to that. But New York has its merits: the buskers don’t just play Irish trad, there is more than one flavor and style of food on any given city block, and despite being a city of travelers, very few people are just here incidentally. The city I live in is a city of purpose, and it’s easy to forget that when you’re immersed in it-- I am still figuring my purpose out, but I’m not giving that up anytime soon.

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2018, 2015, 2016, and 2017, respectively.

The first two, I meant to write about specifically, in relation to each other. Then I thought about the other two images, and decided to look back.

The photograph taken in 2015 is not all that different from the one taken in 2018. I almost feel like I look older in the 2015 version. I am almost certain I took it after I was crying. When I was in San Francisco (where the 2018 photo was taken, in my airbnb), I was sort of channeling that same energy. It’s using the same 35mm camera that Caiti sold me for $20 in 2015, and a lens she loaned me for the SF trip. This was taken before I shot Dan and Erin’s wedding, waking up in a new city where I’d never been, having taken myself all the way there alone. 

All these pictures are about solitude. While mildly cliche, it’s true: the photograph in 2015 was taken as a testament to my “ability to be alone.” My mom told me often growing up that she wanted to raise her kids to be able to sustain themselves-- financially, sure, but also socially. I can take myself out to dinner or a movie or shopping or some park or art gallery, and be just fine. 

But christ, how lonely. That’s what the photograph in 2015 reflects, which I must’ve taken after the umpteenth time my boyfriend in Idaho had dumped me over the phone. Or when I realized he wouldn’t call me back. I also wanted to photograph what I thought was a cold sore for a long time (and turned out to be impetigo). 

The loneliness leeched on me in that same way. It’s a blunt and sort of clunky metaphor, but that was the character of a lot of things then: my image-making practice (there are still many dust spots in this picture & there were three adjustment layers when I reopened the 2015 file) and how I carried myself, for two things. The 2018 image, though sleeker, makes me feel as though I have only become better at embodying loneliness. I trap myself in the entire frame, suspended in a glass jar like a specimen-- under the guise of a fashionable portrait, so no one bothers me about malingering in my loneliness. The aforementioned ex boyfriend said I would do anything, work as hard as I could, just so I could be left alone to do my own thing. He gets more wrong every day. 

The 2016 and 2017 images are other documentations of solitude, in this same way. Though different from 2015 and 2018 they also have odd similarities to each other. 2016, I took after photographing myself nude on a Pratt-issued twin XL bed, sideways, looking at the camera. This was sort of the reclamation of (clothed) self because nude self-portraits, more like normal self-portraits, are not my forte. Having said that, the 2017 image was preceded by other nude self-portraits; however, those are faceless. Headless. I also omitted the nude self-portrait I took on New Year’s Day 2018, though they actually work pretty well. 

Can anyone else tell how bad I am at describing self-portraits? Why do I only photograph myself while sad? 2017 is the only image not using a mirror; I set up the Mamiya 7ii rental from Pratt on the ledge in my room I was renting from Anastazia in Windsor Terrace and turned on the self-timer. In 2017 and 2018 I am looking right at the lens. But what am I actually looking at? Or, in certain cases, what am I looking away from? What do we take with us each year? What engages or disengages? 

No clue. I don’t have a whole lot to look away from at the moment. I have finally garnered enough momentum to vault myself into a new and different way of life, which is what I do. I’m better at exposing, I’m decent at doing things alone. I don’t know if I cry less or more. I have managed to remain in living spaces that are made up mostly of honeyed wooden floors. 

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Thinking about the year before I moved to New York, changes, all of them.

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Been too tired to even process fully that this was my first Thanksgiving without blood relatives in the picture, so here are some photos from the last time I saw my family. I miss them.

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Last night at work was rough. In a moment tinged with exhaustion, melancholy, and general hopelessness, I turned around from the triple sink and heard Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” play. I’m listening to it as I write. 

In that moment, I flashed back to November of 2016, my first shift at the Chelsea location, a Friday night where we stayed until 2am (normally we’d be done by 12) because the two people training me couldn’t figure out how to balance the cash drawer. I remember being asked to sweep outside the front area while that song BLASTED over the speakers and Seamus, the first person to train me, danced around the back. I remember Seamus a few shifts after that, telling off a disconcerted customer who I’d given wrong information to because I was brand new, saying, “OKAY, THANKS, BYE!” I remember feeling like a part of a real hardworking team.

The company I work for is different now. We have a required playlist at every store. We were only playing the playlist I made in early 2017 (”CLOSE THE STORE” is its title) because I had been at work for 12 hours. The store was finally closed and I was very done withe the required playlist. Thinking of myself then, as I sit here now, I find it funny that I so often wish I could go back to the non-entity I was when I first started. I’m not going to flatter myself and say I am essential to operations but they saw promise in me and promoted me twice within 18 months. Now, I manage. Now, I lead. Now, I do stupid dances and sing bits of the song from the LEGO movie (“Everything Is Awesome!”) and Vine clips, to try and cheer myself up, while my staff members look at me funny. I have made some semblance of an impact. I’m still part of a hardworking team, I still feel protected. 

Also, my life is in fact better now. I took this picture in Windsor Terrace when I lived there last year. I have so many pictures that look like this but I can remember almost exactly where every one was taken. I could probably walk you there and point directly to it, almost every picture. 

But, this light was one of the only comforts I had in that neighborhood: the Prospect Expwy overpass at sunset, the big bed that took up the whole room, peanut butter sandwiches when I’d come home from work at 1am, 2am, 3am if I was unlucky (or went for a beer), sometimes with ice cream in my hair. I rushed, from everything, to everything. I had $50 every week, I was asking my boss to buy us Popeye’s at work. I didn’t slow down until I went home after I graduated from Pratt, for maybe four or five days. I haven’t put on makeup to get tips at work in months, and that alone feels nice. 

I did roll out of bed this morning and long for writing papers instead of organizing a storefront, but, really, the grass is always greener, and at least for the time being, I’m glad I’ve found something I’m pretty good at. I think in the next life I will look back on this and remember the merits of this job, remember making kids excited about sprinkle cookies, making couples happy because I’ll split their milkshake into two cups for them, being the first person people see when they are getting their morning coffee. I’ll put my life into perspective, remembering the gratitude I feel for a customer asking me how I am (instead of just barking at me); I will remember where I came from. The pictures are part of this too, of course, but it’s hard to discount what I have spent so much time doing these past two years.

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Wanted to drop some photos here. Worked all day, ran more errands uptown, came back downtown, killed a migraine (somehow), and banged out these edits, almost subconsciously. This muscle needs to be exercised and loved!

These are all from the last year. The photo of my parents sitting down is from last Thanksgiving. This is the first year I’ll be spending Thanksgiving away from them. Over the next few months I’ll be pushing the longest time I’ve spent away from my hometown. I feel like the only people I’ve photographed this year have been my parents, but I know that’s not true-- Caiti and Rachel and my sister (possibly?) and various sundry others have made appearances. And a self portrait or two, further down this blog. Still have no clue what to do with those.

None of these photos were taken in New York, and only one was taken above the Mason-Dixon line. In three weeks (!!!) I’ll be traveling to California for the first time, alone, hoping to break this streak of being unable (”unable,” I know, is a construct) to photograph outside of the same 150-mile radius. 

San Francisco, then LA, then back home for around four weeks. Then an eleven-day trip from JFK to Dublin and back, with stops (that I have not planned yet, someone give me a reason to plan them please) in Galway, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and probably Inverness if I can do it. I want to know everything I can do and then map it out and then, go do it. 

The last one is indicative of some regrets: I think I wrote when I first got these developed about having wasted something like three rolls of film on what were meant to be star photographs and what turned out to be blank exposures. This was the only one of those exposures that came out. The muscle needs to be exercised and loved. The file name on the first picture is, and has been since I scanned it, “the fucken moon.” There’s not much else to say about it. I want to take dozens more and play with all the colors. I want to under and over expose the moon. I want to hold more stars in my images. Thinking of the photos as image fields-- expanding like that, like multitudes of blades of grass, organically scattered, but also predetermined in some way, brings me a whole lot of calm.  I’m annoyed but learning how to use a flash for this wedding I’m traveling for, and excited to try and put flash towards my personal work. 

I’ll be traveling with a 35mm camera I hold very, very close to my heart. I will also be watching two very close friends get married but also meeting someone whose writing I admire, Victoria Hannan. She has a tinyletter like I do but uses it a bit more constructively. I have just been spewing lately. It feels right, though-- setting an intention, even if it may come across that way, is not just saying things for the sake of saying them. It’s a goal. These are goals. Ideas. Tremors along the tendons of this muscle I want to keep exercising, this creative membrane. 

I am so grateful to be able to come back to these pictures.

[ecmusgrave]

As soon as I get to the publish point, every single time, I notice something else I can change about the image. 

A lot of the time I am worried that I’m losing my touch with image editing. I’m not, it’s just coming back to me a little bit later. All that takes is practice. You’ll be seeing more photos here.

I am listening to game 5 of the World Series as I write this. It’s been hard for me to stay excited about my team, which sounds like a travesty (in a lot of ways, it is). I think that requires practice too. It’s not so much that I’ve had trouble taking care of myself, but more so that I’ve maybe been too forgiving with myself. I think practice and discipline are what I need, going forward. Practice, discipline, and some more crisp images like this one. 

But who knows! In the meantime here is a picture of a dead thing, no surprise here. The depth makes me happy, and I was able to get some nice gestures among the branches. Took a bit of pacing. Took some deep breaths high up a mountain I know well. I’ve been trying to come back to that calming place lately. This dead tree, if you can imagine, helps.

[ecmusgrave]

I haven’t quite hammered down the photo on the right, but the one on the left makes immense sense to me. Want to post both of them to have a place to think about them.

I don’t have a lot of time. I meant to leave here sooner. I’ve had a headache all day. I thought I left my wallet on the train, lost it between one store and another, and was just told I left it at work. I overslept by 2 hours today. I feel like everything is out of control, I feel dizzy. It makes looking at myself harder, I think.

But the photo on the left grounds me. The light and the patterns of color across the ground, the way the shadows peck at their subjects. I have a habit of not focusing properly on things when shooting at this kind of angle (my feet), but this one is in focus. At 100% you can see the edge of the microscopic moss lit up, you can see the hum of shifting leaves, you can see something I find extremely calming, unfailingly so: minutiae. I cherish this. 

The one on the right, I’ll figure out later.