As I catalogued the photos for this year and curated them down from 97 images I saw something different than I did during last year’s process. Before they were just single moments in time. Now I was seeing moments in my life, how things changed. Foods I had paused to get that I no longer eat. My dog needing an antibiotic. Myself needing a castor oil pack. Grieving a lost friend.
These were phases that came and went over the year, difficult moments in our household, changes, adaptations. I began to see the photos as a supplement to my journal, a document that charted moments of my life. Not only were there simple gestures included but inside of those captions a world of emotions that went with them. All the nervousness I felt when those health moments arose, how I looked to deal with them, solutions that worked, others that didn’t.
I also saw myself re-watching things I had watched in 2014 and capturing new moments of pauses, or capturing them at all, if perhaps they were not captured during the previous watching.
I never notice the pause until I return to the screen. I would think after two years of this process I would be more conscious of when I push that little button, but I am not. I hit it due to whatever necessity of life requires it. It is only after this need is attended to that the art is made.
Toward the end of the series of images for this year, I stopped recording the reasons for the pause—the captions. At the time I just thought that the words seemed trite. The images were so powerful, but in reviewing these, I see how I missed out on this documentary process. For that I felt equally nostalgic and grateful. I didn’t necessarily want to re-live some of the moments captured in those pauses that I did record, and I can already anticipate things coming in life that I do not want to capture in art for eternity. So perhaps, in these un-captioned photos, there is something more mysterious, more personal, beyond the mundane, beyond words altogether—simply the need to pause.
