This month we welcome guest photographer Lucy Wainwright. Lucy is a film photographer, member of the Film Shooter’s Collective, and founding member and writer at She Shoots Film. You can see more of her work on Instagram at thelucywainwright.

I’m 46 today! It feels nice. I’m unprecedentedly happy in my skin, and that’s something of a victory.

In a few months time I will qualify as an art psychotherapist, after three years on a postgraduate course of lectures and workshops, reading and writing, and spending time with real human clients on placement.

Alongside this I have been parenting two delightful teenage sons, one of whom has a diagnosis of autism, and making as many images as I can, both with and without cameras. Which is not nearly enough! It has all been very intense, and deeply satisfying.

My psychotherapy practice is about coming alongside the complex, heartfelt, idiosyncratic realities and narratives of people who struggle with relating, with self-regulating and with their no-longer-appropriate methods of coping with often very ancient traumas. The private meanings people make or reveal with their art can be contradictory, surreal, hilarious and profound, and we are always reaching for the heart, the centre, the deepest feeling of what it feels like to be them.

In my own art, which is photography, I am also striving to know and to show what it feels like to be me and to be here. My realest reality is my passionate love and awe and dreaming and wanting and feeling, like a child; like a turbulent, naked heart.

With the different cameras and lenses and film stocks and ways of shooting and methods of development that I use, I hope to show not just what I see, but how I feel about what I see, which is that the world is magical. It’s amazing! Everything is so beautiful I can hardly bear it.

I might be halfway through my life, or I might be more. I hope that this learning, this journey to the centre of feeling and meaning never ends.

Do you want to Be Our Guest?  Leave us a comment below with a link to your blog, Instagram account, or other place you post your images.  You can also add a hashtag to your IG images: #viewfindersio_beourguest.

See you soon.

xo lucy