An exciting note before this week’s letter: I have a confession to make… When I bought the van, I didn’t know how to drive. My entire vanlife dream was founded on trusting that I could learn, and more importantly, that I would enjoy driving. This week I passed my driving test. It was my second attempt after a long and complicated journey with learning. One of the reasons I don’t have the funds to complete the van is that my first instructor was terrible, they cost me a fortune and taught me very little. Sadly, it took me a long time to realise how wrong everything was going and to find the courage to switch instructors. Once I had, more money needed to be spent helping me to actually learn. Thankfully Helen is amazing, and all our efforts paid off. I passed my test. I am floating, joyous, and so relieved. I can’t wait to have a lesson in my van and drive it for the first time. I can feel my future beckoning.
Bring me that horizon.
Last week, in her Substack My Morning Muse, Susanne Helmert wrote a beautiful letter to photography. I was so moved by her words that I asked if she minded my borrowing the concept. She kindly agreed. So here it is, my love letter to photography…
Dear Photography,
You have been there my whole life. You where there the day I was born, recording me coming into the world. You enchanted me as I grew, staring out at me from the covers of National Geographic and my mother’s photograph of performers on Bondi Beach. You caught my childhood games and family holidays. Then you caught my eyes, hands, and heart, when aged 16 I was given my first camera.
You are why I am an artist. The first time I took a photograph was the first time an idea came out looking the way I had imagined. I knew instantly that you were my future. That conviction has never changed. When I hold a camera in my hand, I feel complete, stronger, more able. You didn’t only give me the road to becoming an artist, you gave me a safe way to approach the world, to experience the things I wanted to experience. You taught me to see, to look, to pay attention. I notice things in the world I wouldn’t if it wasn’t for you. Unsurprisingly some of those things have been inherited, my love of door and windows handed down from both my mother and my father. Some are all my own, and they have led me on grand adventures.
I didn’t know much about you when I held my first camera, but I learned quickly: your invention, history, and evolution fascinating me. The magic of the darkroom holding me captive. I discovered the names and people behind the photographs that had sparked my imagination as a child. I heard the phrase ‘The Decisive Moment’ and knew I would spend my life searching for it again and again.
You are the foundation of it all. Every idea begins with you, every project has you at its heart. I would not know where to start without out, nor how to end. Even as my art changes, I hold fast to the surety that you offer. Whether others can see you in my sculptures and installations doesn’t matter. I know you are there. You are my sketchbook. You are my destination. You are the route from start to end. Without you nothing would be created.
I have almost lost you on more than one occasion, and the fight to keep you has been harsh. But you held tight to me, your roots deep into my creative centre. You would not let yourself be lost or taken from me. In hold on you led me out of depression, out of creative block, out of doubt. You have kept me on my artist’s path.
You still watch me from every surface, from books and frames, and from the cameras I have sitting out on shelves. Those objects of exquisite beauty and function are part of what I love about you, part of what inspires me. They are the peak of an artists’ tools. You watch me from gallery walls, singing a sirens song to me, painting a future in which my photographs will be on those same walls.
You paint your pictures with light and glorious engineering. I have learnt to use them both, to speak with them both.
I am grateful for my voice.
I cannot wait to see where else we go together.
I love you,
Rosie
Paid Subscribers, read on for the story behind the first photograph I took and truly loved: a portrait of my incredible sister.
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