Gilded Flashes

Navigate through this project using the luminous images on each page.

Light affects everything we experience. It is the life-giver to our memories, the difference between our days and our nights. It's almost inescapable in our age of phone screens and streetlamps. It has also been a motif in my creative work, one that helps me explain my relationship with myself and the world around me.

Photography itself is, quite literally, all about light. The camera knows only what it is exposed to, and no more. It forces us to work with what's there. In this way, it's a little bit like life itself: you can choose to capture and interpret it however you like, but you cannot change reality. Photography teaches us how to accept and cherish the truth in front of us - and to notice what's beautiful about it.

My ill-fated semester at Lesley University
was a transformative time in my life. Surviving that semester was a bit like crossing my own personal Rubicon – not a big river (not academically challenging) but very, very symbolic. I wasn't waging war on Rome, so to speak, but I was moving into a new period of my life – adulthood – with lots of trepidation. Surviving the gloominess and isolation of my first college experience put distance between my "old" life as a teenager and the newer, richer, more fulfilling life I found afterwards.

My grandmother had the kitchen at the Hunter's Run house redone as a 70th birthday present to herself. That was in 2011. For most of my life, her kitchen has been a happy place for me: warmly lit, with skylights, French doors, and a bay window looking out into the wooded backyard. In the morning, this side of the house is flooded with sunshine. I hope one day to have a space like this of my own – a bright, warm, familiar backdrop for the beautiful scenes of everyday life.

There can be something very lonely about late-afternoon sunlight. This scene, also from my time at Lesley, speaks to that kind of solitary beauty. Part of getting older is becoming "okay" with solitude, and with your own company.

Also - one of solitude's silver linings is that you have the freedom to slow down, stop, and take a picture. There's nobody waiting for you, nobody tugging at your sleeve, nobody rushing you onto the next train. When you're alone, you're free to notice as much as you want.

I have never been able to escape the seasons – they've marked and witnessed every moment of my growing up, always reminding me that time is passing and can't be stopped. The first snow of winter, or the last snow in spring (perhaps like the one pictured here) is always a touchstone, a timestamp. Everything has its season, its climate, its smell, its way of catching the light. Every snowflake will melt one day, irradiated by the same kind of energy that illuminates its beauty.

The light on a early-winter evening is the kind of light that invites you in. You know that, wherever the light is, there is warmth. There will be a chair, a cup of tea, a voice or a television in the background. In the same way that wolves were drawn to human fires, I am drawn towards lamplight, especially in the darker seasons. Orange hues like the ones in this scene from Islington Street are, to me, as warming as a wool-coated hug.

There's something sadly beautiful about an old car. They're captivating. Everyone likes to photograph them. They also show up frequently in my poetry - cars with tales to tell, cars with personalities, scarred, leaking oil, headlights fogged ... to find an old Volvo under a streetlamp, or to capture the glowing eyes of a friend's Highlander, reminds me of travels, of all the places I've been and all the memories that, years later, grow hazy.

Afternoon sunlight, slanting across the parking lot ... this is the way memories are shaded. This picture captures it perfectly: the soft blur, the familiar warmth, the distant detachment of the subjects. I took this photo from the inside of an Amtrak. I thought it would be a crumby shot, taken through the dirty window, but it's more wistful somehow. I felt wistful all the time in those days. The train rides were perfect for brooding and self-relection.