It Is Only With Gratitude That Life Becomes Rich
March 2009
Photography and gratitude have the same basic mechanism: you stop and notice something that was already there. The difference between a photograph that matters and one that doesn't often comes down to whether the person making it was actually paying attention. Gratitude is just sustained attention with warmth in it.
This post is from a March when a lot was going wrong and I was finding it hard to feel much of anything useful. I kept photographing anyway. Not because the results were good — most of them weren't — but because the act of getting up and finding one thing worth looking at each morning was keeping me in the habit of noticing. Eventually the noticing caught up with the shooting, and a few frames started feeling like something.
Albert Schweitzer's line — it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich — is the one I keep coming back to on the hard weeks. Not as advice. Just as a reminder that the frame is already there if I'm looking. The Reflect series comes from that same sensibility. The prints page and portfolio overview have more.