I have a lot of photographs of my desk.
I didn’t decide to take them. That’s the part I keep turning over. There was no project. No plan to document anything. Just a time when I wanted to capture what I was working on that day, so I photographed it.
And then another morning.
And another.
I only noticed the pattern later. The way you notice you’ve worn a path across the grass. Not by choosing to walk it. By having walked it so many times.
My desk never changed much. And yet every photograph is different. A different hour. Different seasons. The light doing the thing light does, which is never the same thing twice.
I think I assumed that to photograph something worth photographing, I had to go find it. Somewhere else. Somewhere bigger. A subject that announced itself.
But the subject had been under my hands the whole time.
It took photos of my desk, of what I happened to be working on that day to show me what I’d actually been paying attention to. Not the desk. The desk was just where my attention kept landing. The photographs weren’t a record of the objects. They were a record of me, returning.
That’s the thing about seeing the same thing twice. The second time, you’re not really looking at the thing. You’re looking at the distance between now and the last time you looked.
So I’ve stopped waiting to find a subject. I think the subject finds you. Quietly, over months, in the place you already know by heart. You don’t set out to make the series. You look up one day and realize you’ve been making it all along.
My word this year is STILL. I keep learning what it means. Some days it’s the still of not moving, of staying with one small frame long enough to watch it change. Other days it’s still here. Still looking. Still noticing.
My desk is still here. And so am I.
~Azzari