Do you ever give thought to the themes you keep returning to? And the whens and the whys? One of the greatest things about having digital photographs on my hard drive is that I can look at the thumbnails in groups and identify the themes that I latch onto- whether for a week or a lifetime.

It wasn’t until I was able to look at my photos together en masse that I was able to understand what my work is centrally about. While I grew up thinking that I had to focus on one vocation, like being a veterinarian or something, I didn’t entertain the thought that I could simultaneously deal with several different foci and still work under one (albeit slightly larger) umbrella.

In tracing back the steps of the past few years, I am able to see that I am working around themes of home, modernity, belonging, women’s experience, the ridiculous and the forgotten. Instead of barreling up one path and wearing it out, I instead find myself following several different paths simultaneously as they ebb and flow with the rhythm of my daily life.

In being able to truly look at the past few years digitally, I am able to start to understand that it’s not the path that you take that is important- it’s that you begin to take notice of the whys and the whens.