I feel like my creative powers have waned recently. It is hard to swallow, but the reality is that the past two years were a massive aberration. The kind of creative whirlwind that if I were to chase it would have me go the way of Jacks Kerouac and London. The place I had to put myself in to generate that much work and see much evolution in such a short time, is not a place anyone is meant to occupy for long. The turmoil and revelation of that time was both ecstatic and terrifying. I rode the knife’s edge of sanity for a solid year in there and I’m happy to have come out the other side in one piece.

For anyone who has followed me for any amount of time, this is old news, but I spent most of the late summer/early fall of 2023 either journaling, photographing, or trying to hold myself together long enough to make it through the workday so that I could get back to journaling and photographing.I remember writing a long Instagram post in the summer of 2023 about feeling like my creative output was about to overwhelm me. I likened the creative outpouring to a tidal wave that threatened to take me over and drown me. I was terrified.

The reality of the situation was that I was processing a life I’d spent three decades trying to bury. The work that began with the Shadow Work series led to a dam breaking in my mind, leading me to recover and forcing me to face memories I spent much of my 20’s in an alcoholic stupor trying to erase. In hindsight I see that all of my work from this time was about processing the grief and coming to grips with the foundational traumas I’d survived in my youth.

Last summer I began to leave that state of mind and my creative output began to slow. At the same time, I found that my experience of the world had changed significantly. By mid-autumn I felt that I’d reached a conclusion of sorts. Many of the warring contradictions inside me had reached a point of cohesion or truce and stability began to return. With that stability came the realization that many of my longest running photo projects had reached a conclusion amidst the turmoil as well.

Early in 2024 I put the Ground series to bed, I accepted that the Temples series was truly done, I hung new prints from the Visual Noise series in a gallery for the last time, and the black and white forest photos I’d started thinking of as my Grief series didn’t seem to work for me anymore. I spent a lot of time grieving the loss of these projects—despite recognizing that holding onto those series also meant holding onto the pain that inspired them.

When the creative tsunami hit in 2023 I was overwhelmed. As I picked apart the masks and facades I hid my past behind, I replaced those parts of my identity with those photo projects. I let my work become who I was. When that work slowed down, it felt like the loss of some part of my self. I found myself questioning whether or not all of my work was wholly dependent on my suffering—that healing from these old wounds meant the end of my creative work. Reinforcing this idea was the fact that I made repeated trips to work on those old projects only to find that I really couldn’t create good images for those projects anymore.

I spent most of the last winter trying to find new projects to replace the old ones with. I thought that that would fill in the wholes in my identity I thought were left by the older projects concluding. Knowing that this is what I was doing and that it wouldn’t work did little to prevent me from pursuing it. The result of that struggle was a lot of foolish declarative statements, walking them back, feeling lost, trying something new, making new declarative statements, and repeating the cycle. A few times I looked into selling all my camera gear and throwing in the towel but started this blog instead.

I began writing a bunch of blog posts and realized pretty quickly that whenever I finished writing one, I would no longer agree with my thesis. Just like my inability to produce new work for those older projects, I found that a lot of my thoughts on the creative process were no longer relevant to where I was. I couldn’t take new photos for those series because I could no longer tap into the source of inspiration that fueled them, which was my goal. In writing out those blog posts I discovered that my thought patterns had changed. I had literally changed my mind.

Over the past couple weeks I took some time away from trying to write about photography to simply sit with my photos, revisit work from favorite artists, and try to catch up with work from artists I followed on Instagram. I kept toying around with the idea of a blog post on how the question “Is photography art?” was still relevant today. I was hung up on the idea that this is a question that persists in photography, but no oil painter or sculptor would even consider the question if their particular medium where in photography’s place. In that process I came face to face with a mental barrier I’d been in denial of for two decades.

My present creative blocks had just as much to do with changes in my personality and thought patterns as they did with a prejudice toward my chosen medium & the beliefs about myself that prejudice came from.

For a long time I would emphasize that I was an artist first, photographer second. While I still feel like that is true, I used to wield this defensively. There were times I’d tell people I was an artist and avoid even bringing photography up. I saw myself as a failed painter and sculptor. Someone who only resorted to photography because she couldn’t hack it in a “real” art medium.

While I would never say it out loud, I felt that photography was a “lesser art form”. That the only way photography could ever measure up to other mediums was through large bodies of work, and even then, only something truly exceptional like The Americans or Immediate Family could ever truly reach the caliber of “fine art.”I fully believed that every photographer, somewhere deep down, just knew they were lesser artists because of their chosen medium.

This didn’t make any sense to me. I’ve read On Photography while taking “serious” art classes. I’ve discussed art at great depth with artists of many different mediums. After meeting and interviewing Keith Carter I came away thinking “this is the kind of artist I want to be”. For fuck’s sake, I was watching Sally Mann develop a collodion plate negative in my elementary school classroom sink the first time I told myself that I would be an artist.

So, where the hell did my belief that photography wasn’t a “real” art medium come from?

In the early 90’s I was enrolled in an after-school art program partially for Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) and partially for “difficulty expressing myself”. DCD, now called called dyspraxia, is such that I never really developed fine motor skills and sometimes my nervous system sends either too strong or too weak a signal to my muscles. This means that as I approach middle age I have terrible joints and am prone to frequent injury. It also means that, no matter how much I practiced or conditioned myself, I would never be able to control a paintbrush, pencil, or pen the way I wanted.

Despite my handicap, I aspired to be an artist. Unfortunately, I also felt that it was impossible due to this “inherent flaw”. This belief has stayed with me for a very long time and has colored most of my major life decisions. Over the years, I found new justifications for this belief as I buried the memory of my DCD diagnosis alongside the other things I either couldn’t face or were far too dangerous to even consider.

In college I stepped away from painting & drawing. I’d became more and more fascinated playing with a 4MP point and shoot I got for Christmas in ’02. After several years playing with that camera I decided to take a film photography class. I had what my professor called a “natural talent” for it. I never developed much technical aptitude with film or darkroom printing, but through the medium I was finally able to exert some control over a final outcome and see my creative vision come to light. My success in photography flew directly in the face of my belief that I could never be an artist. After a lot of internal struggle I concluded that photography must be an inferior art medium and any success I was able to have in it was further evidence of that conclusion.