Girl of Color

I am a girl of color. I love color. It is everywhere and I am it. It is all around us and it can change how we see everything.

When you're reading, color defines the landscape in your mind. The writer gives you a thing, say the ocean. An image pops into your head. Hopefully it's a big blue-green wet thing. But then the writer continues to tell you that the low summer sun blazes through the waves, lighting them up from behind. Making the world before you a swath of aquamarine gold.

Now doesn't that change things? Doesn't that fill you up with emotion?

This is why I love color.

This is why I am a girl of color.

This is why I love taking black and white photos.

Surprised?

Maybe not.


I love going out and taking black and white photos.


I'm creating something.


It's like writing a story. You're trying to translate this glorious world in your head into words. Defining it, giving it shape and texture.


When you take a photo, it's the same process. You're trying to take this world of color before and translating it into a world of grays, whites, and blacks.


But I like taking photos better than writing. I didn't think I would ever say that, but it's true.


For some reason, writing is harder. I think it's because finding the right word is harder than finding the right angle.


There are so many words, so many ways of putting them together, but there are only a certain number of minutes before the lighting leaves you.


I think I like photography because it keeps me here. It hones me in, and I'm getting good at it. Ceramics can ground me and get me rooted, but it's harder to translate. I don't remember the rules.

Photography is different. We connect. I can translate it easier because, while I've only written for a little while, and I've only mucked about with clay for a few months, and I've only sung for a few years, I've been seeing my whole life. I've always been surrounded by things to see and evoke emotions with that sight. So now that I have a camera in my hand, I can translate. As long as I know the rules in photography I can translate so much. So much of all the things that have entranced me all my life, so then they can entrance people who see my photos. And even though I'm not incredible, I know that with more work and practice, I can get to the point where someone looks at my photo, someone like me, and they can be moved just as I have been moved by so many other photos.


I want entrance people.

I want to translate all of the glorious things I see and feel so others can be moved.

So others can gasp and feel the world open up before their eyes.

So others can feel the love and light of this world brighten inside them.


So others can feel their souls again.