(above photo found in my grandfather’s work shed the same day he was buried)

“Sounds as if you are having the type of adventure that most people only dream about.  Keep taking advantage of every opportunity you get.  The world is a big-big place and there is so much to see and do.” -Buck Brinson, Jr., my father, 11.05.09, in an email to me

My life has changed so much since I left my life as a staff photographer at a daily newspaper in late February.
It’s the little things, like editing photos at 10 am in my pajamas, and eating dinner while editing photos, and having my cat walk across my desk while I edit photos. It was never really possible for me, but I could try and turn photography on and off when I worked for someone else. Now photography is always on–on Saturdays and Sundays and at 1am.
Y’know, it’s also the really big things– I’ve been thinking about the shifts and fluxes in my photography since then and how I feel about my role as a photographer and why I do what I do, which is something that unfolds and evolves and then changes every day.
And with that, today, with Thanksgiving simmering on the stove, I want to talk about gratitude.
I’m so often wrapped up on what I have to mark off my to-do list that I forget about incredibly lucky I am; to pause and give thanks. Today, I am at a point where I can say I am doing exactly what I want to do and I know so very few people who can say that. (I’ve seen that longing in my own father as he has transitioned jobs in the past decade. I see it in my friends who graduate with fancy degrees but still feel like they don’t know what they’re doing and what they’re meant to do.) I may not be positive about why, but I am meant to take photos and obsess over them and edit them down in my pjs for hours when I wake up, before I brush my teeth and eat breakfast or lunch, and to stay at cheap hotels for a week while I document a community all hours of the day.

I am so very grateful for having found this passion and, with it, such a strong support group in Luceo and my family and my partner.

Since April, I have traveled to Mexico (twice), Seattle, San Diego, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Saint Lucia, South Carolina, New York, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia. I’ve hung out in a trailer with circus clowns in Meridian, Mississippi, a hazardous storage shed in Auburn, Alabama, atop an RV with screaming NASCAR fans, a graveyard of villagers celebrating past lives in Xoxocatlan, Mexico, atop a kayak headed down a flooded street toward a flooded home in Atlanta, and winced atop a horse as we wound up and down mountains behind third-generation Mexican cowboys. Never would I have imagined all this fullness and adventure eight months ago, which is not to knock my previous job, but a knock on my limited foresight about the mileage of hard work and possibility.

My life is  so full–of meeting amazing people and going to beautiful places–all because of a camera,
it has been for years.

How could I not pause and be grateful?

My vision is the same since leaving newspapers, but now I’m starting to see it all differently. Distancing myself from the 9-5 has given me a bigger gift than seeing new places farther from home: it has made me truly appreciate the portrait I take of a complete stranger for a top publication as much as the photo of my own dying grandfather and a Polaroid of my mother on the beach on vacation. Both the impersonal and the personal are personal and they are woven through the same eyes. Both are valuable. Both are attempts to freeze time.
Every photo I’ve taken makes up my collective memory.

Now, no one has to think my photos are amazing or easy to understand on A1.  Not every photo I take has to please an editor.
They’re all my memories. They’re all so beautifully flawed. They’re all so I won’t forget. They’re all so I am grateful for every single day I’m given to try and make the ugly beautiful and the beautiful interesting.

They’re all so I can’t forget any of this.

This strong pull to document and preserve my own history, and in turn my memory, is the best freedom I’ve ever felt.
It all feels so selfish, really. I love what I do so much.
So let me take one more moment to say I am grateful. So very grateful.