A MONTH OF REFLECTION

It’s been one month since I stopped posting my work on the internet and I finally feel ready to come back to the online world. I feel full again, full of inspiration and of happiness. Although, I do feel like I need to explain my reasons for leaving. I think quite a few of you assumed I had been bullied online or received hateful feedback that had made me shy away, but in fact it was nothing like that. I had become lost. I realised that the person I appeared to be online didn’t feel like the real me at all. My pictures had morphed into what I thought they should be, I was creating purely to ‘post online’. I needed to see that if there was nobody to see my pictures, would i still take them at all?

(warning this is quite a long and rambling post…. you might just want to scroll down to the pictures!)

It’s a very strange thing, ‘the internet’, I really don’t fully understand it. It can do really wonderful things, especially for creatives like me. It allows us to project our work out into the world, it creates amazing opportunities, it helps us to form relationships with people whom we would otherwise never meet, but it is also a poisonous thing. People hide behind computer screens saying spiteful things for no good reason. There is this addictive sort of competition, whether it is with how many Facebook fans a person has, how many people view their blog, how many followers someone has on instagram. It’s created a whole new kind of ‘famous’ that is much more accessible to the wider population than becoming a famous musician or a famous actress. I took a step back, I reflected on my life, in the grand scheme of things, how important are the numbers really? And even more importantly, those number of fans, views, followers are not just numbers. They are real breathing people, people with dreams, people with skills, people who are taking time out of their day to tell you they genuinely like what you do. It wouldn’t matter to me if I had one ‘fan’ or twenty ‘fans’ or four thousand ‘fans’ because they are not fans, they are wonderful people who mean the world to me for telling me that they appreciate what I create.

This month I saw Tavi Gevinson speak at the Melbourne Writers Festival and every word of her talk was genius and inspiring and damn right amazing. There was something that struck a cord with me more than anything else, and that was that being a fangirl is a really wonderful thing. Being a fangirl doesn’t say anything about the thing that your fan-girling over, it actually says a lot about you. Your ability to love and appreciate something goes to show that you’re a wonderful person with the ability to express love. This was such an eye opening thing for me, it’s something i’ve been thinking but unable to explain for quite some time now. The number of people following my work says nothing about me, but it says everything about them.

I started my photography page in January of 2011. I was eighteen, young, naive and I never dreamed I would be where I am today. I grew my wings that year, living out of home and learning what kind of person I really want to be. Sometimes I feel alien-like because I struggle to relate to anyone else. I have no desire for money, I don’t desire fame, I can be in a crowded room of strangers and yet feel so elated in how very alone I am.

I am constantly reminded at university, through advertisements and from other photographers, that I should be marketing myself and my ‘business’. I should have a strong branding, I should post at least once a day on Facebook to keep a regular engagement, I should project an image of myself that people will fall in love with and therefore build a stronger following. What about if I want to just be me? I’m not whimsical, I’m not drenched in nostalgia, I can’t pretend to be this wood-nymph who emerged from the forest and speaks in rainbows.

I’m just a girl who is strangely obsessed with taking photographs. I don’t care about being ‘published’ or shooting for the biggest brands, I just have this burning passion to document everything. I’m terribly shy in unknown situations and i’ll do anything to avoid confrontation. I’m a little bit OCD when it comes to cleaning… and my secret guilty pleasure is playing Call of Duty on play station. I can’t cook to save myself but I guess that i’m lucky to have a very talented boyfriend on the cooking front. I’m very ordinary, but I couldn’t be happier.

I watched a documentary the other night and I found tears streaming down my cheeks because finally I had found somebody I could relate to, somebody who is a little left of centre but completely ordinary. Bill Cunningham is an eighty four year old photographer for the New York times and I first saw a snippet of the documentary on Lucy’s television while I was visiting. I had no idea what kind of an impact it would leave on me. Bill says, “If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid. That’s the key to the whole thing. Money is the cheapest thing. Freedom is the most expensive thing”. This is something I will always live my life by.

For Spring I have so many good things to look forward to, it’s Martin and my four year anniversary, my twenty-first birthday, my father is coming to visit and I am travelling to Indonesia with seventeen other creatives. The air is warm and smells sickly sweet, the paths are littered with colourful blossoms and the sunsets are rich and full. Life is beautiful.

this month i travelled to adelaide to shoot the A/W 14 campaign for casper&pearl.

i caught a taxi from the airport straight to the studio where i filmed a bts video of the lookbook shoot.

talented photographer diana melfi on the left shooting the lookbook and sweet stacey, designer of capser&pearl on the right

the following day fifteen pretty models ran around the city wearing C&P while a video was filmed for the sooki boutique launch and i took some pictures which i will release very soon!

on the tuesday we had a full twelve hour day of shooting the campaign. the very first lookbook i ever photographed was stacey’s first collection for casper&pearl, so when we drove by the forest that we shot that first lookbook in, we couldn’t help but feel a little giddy. i quickly snapped a picture from the window.