It's been a long time
I’m not going to try and sum up the last 11 months other than to say they were really hard and also included brief glimpses of beauty/good/peace. Some of those I memorialized in images or words, most of them I did not.
I’ve said this before, but posting here continues to feel important for accountability, for building a body of work, and for reminding myself of where I’ve been and where I want to be going. It is in no way comprehensive (because who actually wants to go through the past year again?)
Generally, though, COVID sort of took over a lot of my free time/brain space/creativity. I did have the privilege of witnessing one of the state’s first vaccine clinics for the general public, way back in January.
About a month before, I tagged along with about 10 people wearing inflatable costumes and cried a lot of happy/sad tears as they danced for residents and staff inside a long-term care facility undergoing a COVID-19 outbreak. I originally went just for the photos/video, but ended up turning the experience into my first narrated audio story for VPR. I think my favorite part about this story was how much my mom loved it — she told me over and over again how proud it made her. I’m so glad she got to hear it before we lost her in March.
And there are a lot of little in-between moments from the pandemic that I was able to photograph. Like the time Barre large animal vet Tom Stuwe let me tag along for some calls. In the photo below, he gets a kiss from Billy the horse while examining an abscess in Don the draft horse, who is held by Doug Giles at Gilestead Farm in Randolph on January 6th, 2021. Stuwe told me he’s been treating large animals for 46 years.
The one other full story I was able to report and write I actually began nearly three years ago now, when I got curious about Bennington’s Mennonite community. I spent a good six months as a freelancer visiting with different families and at church services, speaking mostly to women about living outside of convention. I struggled to find a good hook for a story until this past fall, when I started thinking about this small group isolating from one another when they were already culturally and often physically separate from their neighbors. VPR published the story in October. The photos below are from 2018.
I continue to be grateful for the portraiture I am able to practice. Most recently I photographed a badass 16-year-old activist named Minelle Sarfo-Adu, who’s researching and speaking on racial disparities in Vermont housing. It was really fun coming up with different poses together.
I’ll end this post with some underwater photos, because they’re some of my favorite to make. The first is from VPR story about Hyde Park’s Green River Reservoir last fall, and I was so excited to get the water level just right to see both above and below (if there’s a better metaphor for getting through this past year, I don’t know what it is). And the second is from today, a self-portrait in Lake Champlain during full immersion, which makes me feel better more than almost anything else.
