I have always been fascinated by creative people. I have been lucky to know a good number of them in my brief 25 years on earth, and I always appreciate sharing frames of reference with those who are different than me. When I say different I mean it amicably.
However, I have never once considered myself artistic. I shied away from even calling myself creative within any area of my life. It seemed like one of those adjectives that was reserved for people with visible talent. Even from an early age, art is evaluated for points, and I knew in the at age nine that I wasn’t good at it after I couldn’t draw a heart perfectly in class. My lack of skill kept me away from exploring what it meant for me to express myself visually.
The message I received from teachers in class was that art was created to be aesthetically pleasing. That’s where I struggled. I wasn’t good at art, what I made wasn’t pretty, so why would I do it? I didn’t realize until much later the definition I used was too narrow.
Even though I couldn’t rationalize myself as an ‘artist’ I have always had a bit of a fascination with skies and skylines. I have been photographing them for a long time, but I never cared to understand why. It wasn’t something incredibly time consuming or detailed, I would just photograph whatever caught my attention on my phone. It wasn’t until I went through a rough patch this past summer that I began to understand what those photos meant to me.
To give a brief backstory, in June I broke up with my girlfriend of three years, my term of service ended in AmeriCorps, and I had to move back to my home state of Pennsylvania and leave everyone I loved behind in Texas. Needless to say, it was a shitty time in my life. I felt isolated, selfish and caged. I lost my normal way to process my emotions, that being talking them out with my friends in Texas. Without them, I very quickly started bottling these turbulent feelings in a very unhealthy way. I turned to photography for solace.
I started a new job in August, and it was a welcome distraction from the pain I had been feeling all summer, but it didn’t do much to help me process what I was going through. I kept up with the theme of skylines and skies while on the road for work. It was in my job description to travel around large parts of the United States, and the driving that was included with that travel was sobering. I took pictures while I drove mostly, but when I had free time I would actively seek out photos in parks, parking lots and on hiking trails. I am obsessed with lights and clouds and how simple environmental changes drastically affect the photograph. I was lucky enough to collect tons of photos, and they gave my travel more personal meaning. I’m no professional photographer, so I started printing out the photos at CVS when I would get back. I have something like 500 photos on my phone, and probably about 50 hanging in my apartment. They remind me of those trips and usually bring back very specific memories.
I have my favorite photos, but the ones I feel most attached to are the ones with the most memory behind them. There is one particular photo I will share with you of a bridge in Dallas shaped like a parabola, also known as the Margaret Hunt Hall Bridge.
My friend Haley came to visit me since I was back in Texas for work. After a long day we decided to find the bridge. Haley told me about it, and I am a math nerd, so I thought it was so cool that it was in the shape of a parabola. As we were driving, we were caught in crazy basketball game traffic in downtown Dallas. We went through it several times to get on the right path, and we were cracking up at a cop who just let us drive right through the VIP traffic to the game so we could turn around. It transformed into an adventure, and Haley kept taking snapchats of me singing to the bridge to try and find it. She couldn’t stop laughing. We continued to sing all the way to the bridge as we walked to the tune of “Where are You Christmas” for our friend Ellen who we wished could be with us. The photo is beautiful with a great backdrop of the sunset behind the bridge. I am fascinated with how the light hits the buildings and reflects back, adding even more color to the photo. The image itself reminds of a hilarious time with one of my best friends and it brings a wonderful memory to the surface of my brain.
These last few months have shown me that my original definition of art was completely wrong. As it turns out, I love to capture beauty, but, as a means to express myself, not to match some beauty standard that I can’t achieve. When I was going through the rough patch and I didn’t know how to explain it to others, I found photography gave me an outlet to help understand my own emotions and feelings. This is what art is actually about, the ability to express yourself, even if you don’t completely understand the emotions you feel. With each photograph I have taken I have collected another important piece of this infinite, yet bounded, experience I have had up to this point. While the world was definitely dark for a while the photos I took reminded me that there was a sense of hope within me that I couldn’t extinguish. Without the chance to make myself vulnerable through photographs I don’t know if I would have fully healed the way I have been able to since this summer.
by Carolyn Shetter
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