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This week, I’ve been listening to Rob Walker’s book The Art of Noticing when I walk around my neighborhood. It’s helped reawaken my senses in a lot of ways and helped me see things anew. Funny thing… a photographer saying they need help seeing, but when I’m working, I’m so focused on who is in front of the camera, and also conscious of moment, light, and composition. When I’m walking around Philly, I’m now playing and looking for random things — the stuff stapled to telephone poles, the things in people’s windows, stamps and writings in the concrete sidewalks. This week, the color green popped out at me, so I tried to be good about not only noticing it, but also in pulling my iPhone out to make a photo. It’s a fun way to keep things fresh and to see things differently.
Here are 5 things I was looking at and loving this week:
After his dad died, Shin Noguchi found many pictures of his childhood that his mother had taken—most of which he had never seen before. Inspired, he decided to document his own children as a gift for his mother, who now lives alone.
10/10 will watch the Great British Knit Off
“To see these fraught Confederate objects1 recontextualized within the context of an artistic exhibit… it takes away some of that power to harm…” If you’re in Los Angeles between now and May 2026, please see this exhibit. It sounds incredible.
“I think there are some things that are deeply important to consider. We’re in a crisis of conscience and a crisis of critical thinking. Pretending that what we’re living through does not have dire consequences for all of us is something I cannot participate in anymore.”2 —Oriana Koren on choosing happiness over an industry that didn’t care if they survived
I opened the NYT website recently, and this ad took over my screen. Oh, great use of photography, I thought… and also, cool, that looks like a Platon photo. It is. So, I did a deep dive… and loved reading about the process and BTS.
Obviously, this is near and dear to my heart, as I spent a long time researching and getting grants to fund a project documenting what was happening to all of the Confederate monuments coming down across the US in the wake of George Floyd’s death. I licensed a handful of my images from Where They Stood to the folks in charge of this exhibit, and they’ll be used in the book for the MONUMENTS exhibit.
There were so many great quotes by Oriana that I could’ve pulled. I almost went with this one. “People should not constantly have to worry about housing, putting food on the table, or having healthcare. The photo industry is not equitable. We’re not getting paid fairly. This industry is deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic. Getting an assignment or not getting an assignment is the difference between keeping a roof over my head or not. This is how I feed myself. This is how I keep myself clothed and housed. I decided, ‘This is not worth it. My health is not worth it. My sanity is not worth it.’”