Keeping track
Sharing more images than words today. I was looking through my phone stream and connected these first images from summer of my daughter and I to some recent shots at a different park. I am always coming back to how we fit into or don’t fit into our environment and how we choose to react and adapt. I’m thinking about who has access to spaces and who has access to comfort within spaces and how those are not the same thing at all. Whether we feel at home in a space or able to be safe or vulnerable has so much more to do with how safe and accepted we feel at our core than the particular company we are around at a given time. I’ve learned there is not safety in numbers for us. There is safety in solitude or near solitude. There is safety amongst gathered objects and where we can escape perception.
I’ve always liked photographing my shadow and I think I finally just this morning understand why. It’s a way of documenting myself and how I move through the world, how I take up space, without making myself available for perception. My shadow is the evidence I exist even if I am not seen. My shadow marches on with me and time, changing and adapting as the day goes. My daughter is not my shadow, no matter how similar we are. Her shadow will go before her and after her the same way mine has and if I’m right about how we engage with the world, I am sure she will be keeping track of her own path as closely as I am.