The Weight We Carry
When the work begins to ask something back.
I wrote about this place once already.
The farm outside Botrivier, the peacocks at the entrance, the lion somewhere up the hill at night. That piece was about the lives we don’t live, the doors that settle closed behind us. You can read it here.
But stillness rarely delivers just one thing.
This is what else came through.
I came out here to be still.
Cornellskop. Wind through the trees, animals moving slowly across the land, a rhythm that holds its own time. I thought I was coming for the encounters. Zebras, cheetahs, lions. A softer version of the wild I’ve yet to fully step into.
But when nothing is being asked of you, everything that’s been waiting begins to speak.
It comes through the wind in the leaves. Through the light catching on the peacock’s feathers outside the balcony. Through the fire at night. Through the sound of a lion somewhere up the hill.
Stillness creates a kind of vacuum.
And whatever sits unresolved finds its way in.
I’ve spent the last few months repositioning myself.
Thinking carefully about what I put out, how it lands, where it leads. Every image carrying direction. Every piece needing to strengthen the signal.
At some point, the work changed.
I felt it most clearly through the camera.
A frame stopped being a moment. It became a decision.
Every time I lift the camera now, it feels like something is being asked of me. A reason. A purpose. A function. A future.
And the weight of that question sits in my hands.
I notice it most when I’m working with form.
Earth, material, shape, the way something is held and made. I’ve always been drawn to structure. Not only buildings, but the architecture of attention, the architecture of calm, the invisible frameworks that hold a life.
And lately, I feel it turning back on me.
As though I’ve built something within myself that I now don’t know how to move through.
Because every time I go to create, there is pressure. Not from the outside. From within.
Photography was never meant to hold this much.
It was meant to fix time. To hold something that would pass. To be a gesture toward the impermanent.
A kind of memento mori. A romance with what doesn’t last.
And now it feels like something else.
It feels like evaluation.
As if every frame must justify itself. As if beauty alone is no longer enough to let something live.
There is a thought that follows me when I shoot now.
That the image will disappear into an archive. That it will go unseen. That no matter how precise the composition, how soft the light, how considered the frame, it won’t land.
And then another thought underneath that.
If it doesn’t land, what was the point?
It becomes a strange loop.
The more I see, the more I feel. The more I feel, the harder it becomes to simply look.
My eyes feel almost too sharp for the moment. Too aware of everything the image could be, instead of what it is.
And that awareness changes the experience. It turns something immediate into something measured.
There’s a sadness in that.
Because the thing that once felt like freedom now feels like responsibility.
The act of seeing becomes heavy.
And I start to wonder if this is the cost of awareness. If the same sensitivity that allows me to notice light, texture, and the smallest shifts in atmosphere is also the thing that makes it harder to stay inside it.
Out here, that question stays with me.
Moving between presence and absence.
There is beauty in front of me. There is also the awareness of everything that isn’t here.
And where my attention lands shapes the experience.
In honor of the wild between, I share that I don’t have a clean answer for this, only the recognition that something has shifted and that the work has started to carry more than itself, and I am learning what that weight feels like in my hands, in my body, and in the space between seeing something and deciding what it means.
x Anna
