I’m sitting on my summer holiday, a little later than planned, thinking back on June. If there was one thread running through that month, it was self-confidence — or more precisely, the quiet, ordinary ways we keep forgetting we already have it.
a lesson from a photo not taken
It started in the Botanical Garden in Berlin, at an art and nature journaling workshop. The task was simple and a little terrifying: pick a plant, sit with it, and draw it without looking down at your paper. Just look and be with it.
I sat there, not looking at the page as I draw – a thought kept nudging me: I wish I could photograph this. Not because for me a photograph would be easier. Because I wanted a record of what it felt like to sit down, slow down, and actually look. There was this darkness pooling between the pale green stems that pulled at me in a way I couldn’t fully explain.
I never took the picture. And I think that was right. Without a photograph to offload the memory the moment stayed with me.
on workshops, and the illusion of “almost ready”
I want to confess: I have gear acquisition syndrome – mine doesn’t show up as cameras or lenses. It shows up as workshops. There’s a voice that says I need this technique, this skill, this course — then my work will finally matter. It sounds like ambition. It’s actually a hiding place. Underneath it is the quieter fear that I’m not enough yet.
I don’t think workshops are the problem — I went to several more in the weeks that followed, and I’ll tell you about those another time. The problem is the story I attach to them. What the Botanical Garden actually gave me was a feeling: alert and calm at the same time. The exact feeling I want when I do my photography.
the picture that mattered most
I tried to recreate that feeling on a walk through my neighborhood, and I found flowers wrapped around a fence — something of that same quality of attention. But the picture that stayed with me longest was much closer to home. Literally: the plant by my own front door.
Light was moving through it that day, scattering into small shimmering spots against the shadow behind the leaves. I photographed it — not to express anything, not to make a statement, just to remember to slow down and expect nothing. And that’s exactly what made it different from everything else I shot that month. There was no workshop behind it or a concept I’d carried in from someplace else. It was an act of pure seeing,
That’s the picture I keep coming back to as an evidence that I don’t need to master anything before I’m allowed to see clearly.
two more, from the art fair
Later in June I went to the Berlin Art Fair, mostly because a few friends kept telling me my pictures deserved to be seen more. It was one of those days when Central Europe seemed to shimmer — and I photographed sun sails stretched over an old industrial complex, trying to hold onto that heat. I noticed myself reaching for a “project” idea right there. Which, of course, is the same gear-acquisition trap wearing a different coat: if I commit to a project, then my work will matter.
The last picture happened almost by accident. I wasn’t at the fair to make photographs at all — just to see what was there. But I noticed dark geometric pipes cutting across soft green leaves outside through a window, organic shapes pressing against hard lines. I simply recognized, before I even lifted the camera, that there was a picture there. That recognition — seeing the photograph before you take it — feels more important to me every month. It’s what keeps me from taking random pictures and starts pointing me toward photographing something that actually means something.
what I’m left with
If June taught me anything, it’s this:
Find something that I’ve looked at a thousand times without ever really seeing it. Wait until I let go of my wanting. Then, take the picture or don’t.
