BOX OF LIGHT

(Note: I scribbled most of this into a torn phone book in a hotel room on our last night in Mexico, 6.27.09, 2:06 am)

Travel allows you to have fresh eyes to something. this, to a photographer, is very exciting and refreshing. some of the most important advice i gave to my little sister, who is in India for the summer, was to write all the wonders down in the first few days. after that initial week or two, the smells, the people, the landscape all feel normal.

the foreignness melts away.

yet, sometimes photos can’t do this task justice. they can’t capture the scene — not the feeling, the excitement, the scent, the wonder. a photo can’t capture a mountain range completely covered in enormous slate grey boulders cradling an otherwise empty desert. it can’t capture us pulling over on the side of one of the windy mountain roads just to take in the wonder of the landscape. or me feeling completely humbled and tiny amongst their beauty. a photo can’t capture the surprise of waking up on the beach of the Sea of Cortez on the edge of the desert to the hot sun and the lapping waves and realizing it’s only 6 am.

photos and words can’t always do these experiences justice.

but we try to record them anyway.

i have this pull in me to try. to always capture my journey, my memories — the feel of it all.

david and i traveled to San Diego for a job and decided to go a week early, rent a car, and to explore Baja California. he mentioned early in our trip that, in our 3+ years and countless miles traveled together, we have never been on a vacation for us… which isn’t entirely true, but it isn’t entirely false. he meant, we have never been on a vacation where we didn’t try to completely document it, or, as in our Guatemala trip, a trip where we didn’t try to bring back a story (Elda and Childhood Malnutrition). we rarely put a lot of energy into anything where photos aren’t the emphasis.

so this trip to Mexico, my first trip there, was more about the journey and taking it in and not worrying about getting great photos or documenting a starving baby.

this sounds great in theory.

it’s less possible for two hungry, passionate photographers.

a sense of longing lingered as we drove through the desert on MX 3, passed through rural towns along the Pacific coastline. a sense of missing capturing moments hung in the air. yea, we took photos, images that captured the beauty of the varying environments. they just brush the surface of our trip, though. they are superficial snapshots.

the longing, that’s what sets us apart from some photographers, i think. (and part of why i’m so content with the members of luceo images, because this is a shared urge.)

photography is always with us. on vacations and adventures, during holidays when we’re home with our families, even in seedy dance clubs in the coastal party city of Rosarito at 1 am.

here is a meditation for my insatiable, visual mind– a brief vacation to live in the moment,

and then,

maybe,

take a snapshot or two: