Making the Work Exist Before Knowing What It Needs
A note on attention, habit, and refinement over time
When I started this project, I wasn’t thinking about refinement. I was excited by the simple idea of making portraits of people outdoors and listening to how they talked about place. I wanted to know where they came from, what the outdoors meant to them, and how those spaces fit into their lives. That curiosity felt like enough to begin. I didn’t have a fully articulated framework or a long-term plan for how everything would connect. I wasn’t trying to anticipate every decision the project would eventually ask of me. I just wanted the work to exist.
Only later did I begin to notice how much of my professional background had quietly shaped the earliest portraits. At the time, I was doing a lot of professional headshots. That work was familiar, efficient, and ingrained. Looking back, some of the first dozen portraits leaned closer to that mode than I intended. They weren’t wrong, but they emphasized the person more than the relationship between the person and the place. The environment was present, but it wasn’t always carrying its share of the story. That wasn’t an intentional choice. It was familiarity stepping in before intention had fully caught up. I don’t think I could have seen that earlier. There weren’t enough images yet to reveal the pattern. It took time, accumulation, and distance to understand what was happening. Eventually, with the help of someone else looking at the work alongside me, it became visible. The adjustment that followed wasn’t dramatic and it didn’t feel like a pivot. It felt like a reminder to slow down. To let the surroundings matter more.
To let the portrait describe a relationship instead of presenting a subject. Once I returned to that way of thinking, the portraits began to align more closely with what I had imagined at the beginning, even if I hadn’t yet known how to articulate it. As the project has developed, I’ve kept encountering versions of that same moment in other parts of the process. The conversations have changed as I’ve learned which questions open space and which ones close it. I started recording audio during interviews, not because I wanted cleaner transcripts, but because I realized how much texture slips away when I rely on memory alone. Writing from those recordings feels different. It brings me back into the cadence of the conversation instead of asking me to reconstruct it after the fact.
The same thing has happened with sharing work publicly. With the reels especially, there was a stretch where I wanted everything to feel dialed in before hitting record. Color, audio, pacing, gear choices. Eventually I realized that waiting for everything to feel resolved was becoming its own kind of friction. At some point, the only way forward was to record with what I had and let the work be imperfect. The limitations didn’t hurt the project. In some cases, they clarified it. Even the way I think about equipment has shifted because of this. Instead of focusing on what I wish I had, I’ve started asking why I think I need it. How would it actually serve the people in front of the camera? How would it change the way I show up? Would it help the work exist more honestly, or would it just satisfy a sense of readiness that never quite arrives?
None of this came from trying to perfect the project early. It came from staying with it long enough to notice where habit was guiding decisions instead of attention. The clarity didn’t arrive first. The work did, and refinement followed through repetition, friction, and observation. There are almost certainly parts of this project I still haven’t noticed yet. That no longer feels like a problem to solve. It feels like part of the condition of making something slowly and staying close enough to it to keep learning what it’s asking for.
