Books Closed for the Remainder of 2023
Thank you so much for visiting my site and showing interest in my work. My heart and time are perfectly full right now and to take on any more work I would be doing us both a disservice.
xo, Finn
THE ONLY REAL VALUE IS TIME
It’s the only thing we can’t get more of.
And so it becomes the thing we want to possess most of all.
That’s why I love photography.
It holds time.
Photography starts as a chemical reaction:
A small beam of light hits a cellulose plate containing silver halide, and in a moment less than a heartbeat, the crystals bloom.
Doesn’t that sound like magic? It has always felt like magic to me. I look back over the last 17 years of being a photographer and realize that it was not just the feeling of a camera in my hand, but the knowledge that in that little black box magic could happen. That magic is the thing that I fell in love with.
In my time, I have photographed people young and old, places around the world, bath towels and baby bibs, solid gold and once even an original Rembrandt. I have used new cameras and old cameras, strobe lights and natural light. I have developed my own film and watched in the darkroom as deep, beautiful eyes appeared on a blank piece of paper. And what I’ve learned more than anything, is that the camera doesn’t matter.
Cameras are tools - paint brushes, instruments, pencils. They are the elements. Only when cameras and lights are combined in a unique way through the artistic of a human can they create something new. But alone they can do nothing. What’s more important than anything is the experience that is happening when the photograph is being made - It is the groom turning his head to see his bride for the first time. It is the silence of the nursery while a new mother holds her baby. It is that last time a great grandmother will ever smile at her great granddaughter in this life. Those are the magic moments - the human chemicals thick in the air that develop into a beautiful image.
Those are the moments I am here for.
Photography is a love language.
I can say I love you. Or I can photograph you with love. A small square image can tell the stories that our language limits. That’s why I work by the motto “Photographing Truth”.
I don’t get to play God that way. I don’t get to manipulate, photoshop, or commercialize something that’s already beautiful. My only focus is to take the truth of a moment and hold space for it within my lens.
Forever yours,
xo, Catherine