Flashback to 2012. I am wandering through an oak and poplar forest with a small “point and shoot” camera in my hands. I snap a picture and review it immediately. I feel like the camera can see things I cannot. Where my own vision skips the details and I “can’t see the trees for the woods” the lens forces me to narrow my field of vision. The limit of the frame requires a cropping out of the full context of place and I feel the invitation to “see the trees.” I accept the invitation, and my love of photography is re-born, a love that would eventually take me to a BFA at the School of Art.
I returned to the woods last week, and it felt like I had come full circle. This round, however, I arrived at the threshold with much more life experience and technical capacity.
Since I was 10 years old and was given my first camera before my first international trip, it has felt like a magical device I can use to see the world. The magic was triggered again when I got that “point and shoot” in 2011. Then again in 2017 when I learned how to develop at the School of Art. Since graduating I lost my daily practice, and I have wondered if I would ever pick up my camera again.
It’s too soon to say what is emerging now, but I feel something is there, a little seed, just below the surface of the soil. Something is opening up. A new photography practice is emerging.
I have come full circle. It is too soon to say what it will look like, but I have lived enough of these creative cycles to ancipate something wonderful. For one thing I am not the same person wandering in the woods. This cycle I am more permeable, made soft by some hard experiences, yet made solid from finding my own edges. I have a new sense of who I am in the woods and in the world and I am ready to look again through the lens of my camera.
Alexandra Ross Works 