She Sits in Bowers of Gold and Green

I've never been too interested in capturing reality in my photographs. I mean to be fair, I am in many ways capturing reality because I am shooting nature and myself; I'm not adding strange objects into the scene or distorting things or altering colors to an extreme, I'm not photoshopping myself into foreign landscapes or fairylands, and I'm wearing clothes from my wardrobe--a mix of pieces that I wear and re-wear beyond the photographs in my day-to-day life. But I'm not interested in pure, documentary-style snippets of life. Those have their place of course, but they don't inspire me personally to create. Even when I first started this blog, a college student, a part-time cashier, frequent thrifter, I wasn't afraid to talk about where I was in life, but I didn't seek to document that. Instead, I remember using my lunch break to race across my campus to find a quiet spot in the woods or in a bed of irises to pose in a vintage dress, trying to look like a forest nymph in the wild. I wasn't trying to pretend I lived a life of perfection or idleness just because I evoked of pose of languid grace in a bed of violet blossoms. I merely wanted to take images that swept me off in a dream like my favorite photographers Tim Walker and Rodney Smith. Creation was and is an escape for me. Taking self-portraits allowed me to be creative when I was studying business and found the classes dull. Styling more theatrical outfits than I would have worn without the excuse of the blog gave me confidence to feel comfortable in my own skin regardless of what I was wearing. And all of it allowed me to craft and escape into a world of stories and imagination. When I look back I feel as if I've always lived half in my head and half in this world; to borrow a quote from a movie, "with one foot on the ground I had flights of fancy." I used to (still do actually) scribble little stories down, imagining myself as the heroine on a grand adventure. Photography feels like an extension of that to me--a chance to cast myself into romantic scenes, each photo a fairytale. I still feel I walk this line between reality and fantasy; no I don't live in the woods and my life isn't all golden leaves and quiet strolls, but yes this is me--my clothes that I wore and a place that I visited and a tree so striking it could take your breath away. I mean how can one stumble across such beauty and not at least momentarily feel thrilled? One foot on the ground, but a head in the clouds...