Wherein I struggle with taking pictures when things are dying

I’m a spring and summer guy when it comes to photographs. Basically as soon as the world starts to die around me my inspiration levels start to tank. I get that it’s an incredibly beautiful time of year, and I enjoy walking in the woods and taking in the changing season but when it comes to turning my camera toward it I tend to just feel, “Eh,” about the whole thing. Something about the fecundity of spring and summer, the Hildegardian “viriditas” that flows through everything is so apparent and so beautiful to photograph. I struggle with the slumber of the world, or something like that.

The leaves fall off the trees and they’re reduced to these decrepit, spindly twigs without fullness or life. And before long this white stuff starts to fall from the sky and blankets everything in white, reducing the vitality and richness of things to hues of brown and sheets of white. And again, I can appreciate it in the context of a lived experience I just struggle to translate it in to photos. All of this really just means that I need to get out in it more and shoot more and figure out how to take those experiences and make them in to photographs. It’s an interesting albeit maddening challenge.

Jess has brought up the idea of a body of work that photographs a certain number of subjects throughout various times of the year to document the changing seasons. I think something like that would be a good way of adding context or meaning to photographs I kind of otherwise would struggle to make. So that could be cool. Either way it’s an interesting season to struggle through for me but I’m trying to push through it this season instead of just shrugging and hanging up the camera for 5 months until the spring come around again.