I introduced my one little word for 2016, Wonder, in my first post of the year, and now at the year’s mid-point, it seemed like a good time to take stock of how wonder and I have gotten on.

In truth, my time with wonder hasn’t gone as I expected. Although I didn’t have a roadmap for my word, I never do, I had envisioned my word would lead me out into the world in search of fresh visual stimuli. Instead, for the past six months I’ve read like I’m in a strange graduate course of my own design. I’ve read in every free moment as if my life depends upon it, and more broadly and more volume than in any time in decades: myths, art history, fiction, psychology and even a little bit of philosophy thrown in for good measure. And so, thusfar, my pursuit of wonder has existed almost exclusively in my brain. It’s been all inputs and introspection, and I have precious little to show for my efforts. This poses a bit of a challenge when it comes to writing a piece for a photography blog.

I hope that before the year is out my thoughts will coalesce into ideas that I use to produce images which I can share here, but for now they mostly remain loose flotsam and jetsam in my head, and I continue to crave fresh new ideas and words so much more than I feel my usual pull to get out and create images. There have been a few occasions this year when I’ve gone out with a camera and a mission to make photos that reflect some of the ricocheting idea fragments from my reading.

I was possessed by the time travel novel, Radiant Days, by Elizabeth Hand. It moved between Rimbaud’s France and my familiar city of Washington DC in the 1980’s, not too long before I moved here for the first time. The local portal was along the canal towpath in Georgetown, and one early spring day I trekked miles on foot from downtown D.C. to the towpath and then across the Potomac River to Virginia to retrace some of the characters’ steps. I never would have made that walk had I not read the book, but because I’d read the book I was practically possessed to do so. Along the way I made images of an altered reality inspired, in part, by this book that played with place and time and reality, and in part by a friend’s wonderful tutorial on multiple exposures.

A few weeks later, on a gray spring day, I felt an itch to move, to get out with a camera and wander, and I went to a park I know like the back of my hand. This day I had it all to myself and to my great surprise, in this very familiar place I managed to find a few hidden spots that filled my eyes with wonder.

It’s entirely possible that I would have made these same images were my brain not steeped in a swirl of fresh ideas and newly forming connections, but I’ll never know. Because all of these inputs – this new information – has and continues to change me and alter my perception even though it leaves no outer marks. I can only imagine what I’ll be seeing after six more months of wonder.

Keep your eyes wide open,
Debbie