A creeping feeling usually finds me right around January 15th, when I look at my quiet email inbox and start nervous-scrolling through Instagram, where my phone tricks me into thinking that everyone else is really busy and I’m not.
I haven’t had a single job of my own in January since moving to New York in 2019. Each year this reminder of my inability to start the year off strong takes my ego down a notch. It’s not all bad though. I take my time. I read in bed before I get up. I clear my desktop of unnecessary screenshots, and back up my hard drives. I eat through my collection of leftover holiday sweets. I start to edit those photos from the previous year that I’ve been avoiding. I rapid fire google all the events I want to go to this year to photograph at and add them into a special google calendar, in hopes this year will be the year. And I start to get itchy with ideas.
I’m a schemer, through and through. My close collaborators will often get a steady string of messages asking them about opinions and dates and reference images when I get my eyes set on a project. I get hooked and have a hard time thinking about much else until I can start it.
And so this cycle happens yearly. I clean house until I can clean house no more, and then start to channel all my extra energy into chasing the ideas that have been swirling in the back of my head for months, try to make them tangible. This year, the itch started bright and early on the first socially acceptable Monday to email people after New Year’s (four days ago). My current obsessions are as follows:
Working on my project photographing people I went to high school with. This idea formed after an open call writing prompt from partial press a few years ago. Next week I am going upstate to make a dent in this work, which I started this past summer. This was a riff off of my early work, Homecoming.
Emilya in her barn (August 2024) My friend and I are planning a shoot at the New York state fair this year. I shoot there every summer, but I’m eager to see it in a new way.
I am working in collaboration with my mom to start a project on our family ties to Norway. We are working on applying to grants and residencies for international artists to work in our family’s hometown of Kristiansand. About 7 years ago, I made a few projects for myself exploring this idea in school, and am very excited to work with my mom towards a deeper unravelling of our complicated relationship with grief, death and the place she called home.
This is the first time I am seriously looking into applying to grants and residencies and am looking forward to the learning curve!I like to try and photograph something love or lusty for Valentine’s Day each year, just for fun, and I’m settling on what I’d like to do.
I want to drive down to my great uncle’s house Lexington, where he breeds day lilies. Our gardens growing up in the summer were always full of his flowers, and they are so beautiful and endlessly fascinating. I’ve dreamed of seeing the farm for years, it sounds like heaven.
Checking out Chittentango, a town near my hometown and birthplace of L. Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz.
Maybe if I write all of these things down, they will happen. I’ve noticed a craving for reconnection with my roots, in many forms. I think this becomes clear in the work I’m hoping to make. For me, photography has been a vessel to get closer to the things I want to know. I’m making time this year to see and get to know the people I know now more deeply and the people I once knew. Maybe this time I will be kinder, thoughtful, more open.
In the meantime, I’m cleaning up the archive and reflecting on the last 12 months. What a good 12 they were! Some favorites from the archive, in chronological order.
Wishing you lots of warmth, safety, health and good food this coming year. Thank you for reading. <3
- Meghan