If wedding photographers are supposed to have emotional boundaries, I’m doing it wrong. I fought tears multiple times throughout the day – asking myself “you barely know these people. why are you crying?” But I don’t have to know them to feel the palpable longing between them. To witness love and devotion as genuine as […]

Graduation is an initiation ritual. We move from one phase of life into the next, side by side with peers, supported by our elders. We alchemize the story of childhood into one of autonomy and self-reliance, taking on an adult perspective yet in a still very childlike form. A space of transition; no longer a […]

The evening green bursts rapture on my skin, luminous warm breath on trees. I am undone, fingertips to dark soil I swim, Awakening to soft kisses from leaves. Bare Skin and the leaves; they are one and the same. The body is our very own patch of earth. How you speak, feel, and interact with […]

Earthen shell this mass of sinew and tissue I have seen most clearly the scars that mark you. Yet I love every imperfection as if they were lined in gold. Do not shrink from me, my clay-made image though dust you will become I rejoice in our withering as I should have rejoiced in our […]

“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free,” Catherine Earnshaw laments in Wuthering Heights. I know this feeling well. I watch my daughter run around picking wildflowers, the wind throwing her long hair into her face as she marvels at the simple magic of untamed plants and I think, how […]

Messy hair and dirty feet. The flushed faces of children who have been running and wrestling for the past hour. Grit on the floor from the dirt they tracked in after playing in the rain-soaked garden. A mixture of leaves and dandelion heads, sand, and water is added to an old battered bowl she uses […]

May Long reflections

The art of seduction isn’t found in revelation. It is found in mystery.

I’m going to take pictures of the stain on your floor, of toes and ponytails, small hands on your face, and the blurred frenzy of movement. The shadows in the hallway and the sunshine on the carpet; they’re poetry of a present turned tomorrow’s nostalgia. And I want you to remember that everything happened in […]

When I was 21, I cut all my hair off in a hotel room because god told me to. part one Weeping so hard I could not see through the tears, I handed the scissors over to my eldest cousin to help. When it was finished, my hair only an inch long, all I could […]