There’s nothing shameful in life being a double edged sword, we can write and if it touches someone, or it helps them to feel less alone then what a gift we’ve found in amongst the chaos.
“Connection is collaborative. For words to have meaning, they have to be read.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about all the ways I get to communicate with people and how lucky I am to have photography.
I’ve been really enjoying working on more portrait sessions over the last few weeks, it’s been great to have the conversations that come with those moments. Thank you to those who have reached out about future collaborative shoots too, lots to look forward to.
I’ve been thinking a lot about all the ways I get to communicate with people and how lucky I am to have photography.
I’ve been really enjoying working on more portrait sessions over the last few weeks, it’s been great to have the conversations that come with those moments. Thank you to those who have reached out about future collaborative shoots too, lots to look forward to.
I also had my first wedding photography stress dream of the year last night which can only mean that wedding work starts up soon. Ugh, the worst, dreaming that I drove for hours to a remote wedding to open my camera bag and there was just a lens in it and nothing else. WHITEY. I think I check my bag about 20 times before I head out to any job cos I’ve got the fear so bad that I’ll forget something. Oooft. Anyways, 1 April and wedding season starts. Although this year it’s way less intense, there’s more time for life and other creative experiments to happen in between which I’m glad about.
Last year’s wedding work had me an emotional wreck. I never get over how lovely a thing it is to share those vulnerable moments with couples. I think it helped kick started me focussing on sorting out my head with crappy past experience so I can move past it all so thank you to all the couples and celebrants who I worked with for giving me food for thought for the drives home. This last wee while has been a rollercoaster. I’m so glad I spoke out on here but it’s been tough to hear so many horrific things from other women. I had a day last week where I just pure rage cried all day long. I never really know how to process anger, it probably used to come out as me being a wee radge drunken liability. But it felt good to just imagine I’m Joe Pesci with a sharp suit and a sharper blade and just weep like fuck for a day, which hopefully was coming from a place of empathy and not psychopathy.
“We are empathic beings who feel for each other. Our very success as a species is rooted in our ability to be aware of each other’s needs, to notice each other’s pain and to experience deeply felt physiological and emotional empathy.”
I guess I just needed to spit it all out and get that guy out of my face and that felt quite selfish or at least focussed on self preservation but I hadn’t really anticipated that it would also open up a safe space for so many difficult and generous conversations which has proved to be a beautiful, emotional and empowering thing.
There’s been a lot of naps too. My body has started to relax and I’ve never needed to sleep so much in all my puff.
Then last weekend I also got to be a guest at a wedding, to get my own suit oot, dance and laugh with good folks. What a treat. Didn’t even take my phone out my pocket, not a single snap taken until I went on a solo art adventure the next morning. It felt fucking great to do things I love to do to feel better and just give myself a bit of time. Thank you to my ace pals Kerri and Mark for the best piss up in a brewery a booze sober girl could hope for. And to the lovely ladies who drove me to Newcastle and didn’t even give me a hard time for booking myself into the wrong hotel.
And after finding my baws about the bad stuff it’s time to do the same for all the good.
For work, we’re making the next changes to the way I do all the stuff too. We’re bringing all the wedding photography, portraiture and the elopement and wee wedding planning with the elopement society into one space on social media so it’s a bit more like the website and so I don’t freak out that I’m spinning too many plates. It feels good to simplify all the ideas into one space. Then there’s still my other instagram page for the loose cannon stuff. Starting to get there with making time for some more creative explorations.
So please follow @solencollet and @solornothing if you don’t already (the name of the wedding photo one has changed to match the website). We’ve got a competition and store sale coming too for a bit of a spring clear out of all the stuff lying around that reminds me of how shit I am at keeping on top of shouting about it all. Well, we’ve just had all the germs and school holidays and meltdowns so maybe it’s more about me remembering that those things happen and they eat into my studio time.
“Or, more simply, creativity is any act of love. Any act of making. It is usually applied to art-making, but it can also be applied to anything you do that requires your focus, skill and ingenuity. It takes creativity to dress well, for example. To parent. To paint a windowsill. To give someone you love your full attention.”
I had an interesting chat with a photographer a few days ago who reckons that wedding work is still really undervalued by folks in other creative sectors. She believes the art world and creative directors are mostly a bit snobby about someone who does any wedding or social photography work like you can’t be good at both even though pretty much all artists need at least one other job to be able to afford to live. So here’s a wee rant about how that can be the day job. For me, it feeds my kid but also through shooting weddings for a decade I’ve learnt so much. I wouldn’t say I’m technically particularly proficient and I’m not into the kit side of things at all really unless it’s vintage film cameras but even then I don’t geek out about that stuff. But through shooting 10 hours on the bounce you learn to hyperfocus to find a composition in amongst all the moving noise like a street photographer would, to anticipate what’s going to happen in a room full of people, you learn to use shite available light, to work in all weathers, to work in awkward spaces with a heap of drunk folks with heightened emotions and family politics, to get a couple’s connection on camera in a short space of time even if they’re super camera shy or hate public displays of affection. All the while you are problem solving, travelling between places you might never have been before, being sensitive to different religious beliefs and traditions. And like studio collaborative work, there’s a team of folks with their own brief to work with - videographers footage to swerve, liaising with venue staff, caterers, makeup and hair, florists, bands, different officiants with their own ways of working all to a specific timeline with literally one break all day and it’s fucking hard work. Then you drive home…And I think that’s me giving myself a lecture about something which I’ll probably figure out in a day or two…
I don’t have any self portraits to share this month as all my work time has been taken up with portraiture sessions of other folks, I’ve lots of edits from those to share soon and I’ve a bunch of ideas to get to work on now that I feel a little less freaked the fuck out so I’ll no doubt share them too. I’ve been doing a bit of my crap writing about things that make me happy and still working away on ways to combine the two things.
I bought myself a copy of On Connection by Kae Tempest on my Sunday art adventure in Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in Newcastle. All the quotes I’ve used are from the book which I haven’t finished reading yet but love already. The person in the shop was delighted to see a copy leave as they said it was a beautiful thing to read. My mate Andy of 5things also sent me this link to their episode about the book. 5things is a regular online breakfast event where 3 speakers discuss 5 things each about a favourite non-fiction book.
I ONLY WORK WITH LEGENDS
Want to have some tea and a rant while I snap photos of your face for use as smoke signals over the mountains of that there internet?
A bad seed, a rotten apple, take oot the rubbish…
I’m feeling really proud of myself for processing some big nasty things in healthy ways. What’s she on about? A lot of the things I’ve been writing and my self portraits I think have all been ways of trying to free myself of the last few lingering voices of old shit that made me feel small.
TRIGGER WARNING: Sexual violence, emotional abuse, male violence.
Here we are, the other side of saying out loud the stuff I suppose I’ve been alluding to for some time. I might be wee but I’ve discovered I have massive cojones. Bada fucking bing. I’m feeling really grateful for the good people around me. I’m feeling really proud of myself for processing some big nasty things in healthy ways. What’s she on about? A lot of the things I’ve been writing and my self portraits I think have all been ways of trying to free myself of the last few lingering voices of old shit that made me feel small.
And as is always the way, turns out the abusive assholes are forever lurking around, desperate for attention and to bring you down a notch or two. This month my rapist ex boyfriend tried yet again to get in touch with me, again trying to follow me online. I blocked him and outed him on the page he was blocked on and the very next day I get a passive aggressive condescending email. To me, that’s only an admission of guilt, I guess he was hoping I’d feel threatened but I ken where you live too, aye and thank fuck it’s far away. So I posted that too. I’ve since deleted it as he doesn’t get to have a voice in any places I exist.
I think I needed to do that for a long time, to name out loud what happened to me too but put it off because I’m deeply mortified I ever found anything about him remotely interesting. He’s a disgusting misogynist playing the part of whatever. I didn’t want to give him airtime as I feel that people like that are just parasitic in their need for attention, good or bad. I feel like people like that completely lack basic empathy and just play act being mostly like everyone else - they’ve got their house and car, wife and kids and some dark as fuck violent secrets and it’s just not somewhere that I want a part of in any way. But that fucker has been trying to darken my door since I was a teenager and it’s not right. His name is Richard Mason, he’s apparently a teacher in USA now, with a family. It always creeps me out how some people can live a complete lie.
“Abusive people don’t abuse everyone and the folks they are abusive to, often it’s a slow build up of insidious ways of breaking down your self confidence and gaslighting the hell out of you so you start to doubt yourself.”
I think it’s important, especially for other men to see, to share this shit cos abusive people don’t stop being abusive the minute you leave them. They will be abusive as long as they can gain access to you so you have to shut them down. Sometimes that can be hard, maybe where there’s strong trauma bonds and a bunch of psychological abuse or you share kids or whatever. Abusive people aren’t always abusive, sometimes they’re in charm offensive mode. Abusive people don’t abuse everyone and the folks they are abusive to, often it’s a slow build up of insidious ways of breaking down your self confidence and gaslighting the hell out of you so you start to doubt yourself. And I’ve been getting really angry about the ways I have doubted myself because of this shit. Being an angry stress-head doesn’t sit very well on me, I’m not into it at all. I’m at home lost in ideas, trying to find time to have a laugh rolling around in paint or whatever.
But in naming it, a load of stuff I had already been through and the big healthy anger surfaced. I had a bit of an emotional flashback for a few days. All that stuff kicked off when my kid was on school holiday and not feeling well. So it was a bit intense trying to juggle it all. I hate that feeling of being back in danger. It can take a while to realise that’s what’s going on and it can mess with your judgement a bit. Thankfully I don’t have many visual memories from those days at all, maybe I’m lucky I was an utter bam who drank waaaay too much and the rest. But the emotional flashbacks aren’t a pleasant thing to go through. They can last days, they used to be longer and more frequent. It’s like feeling stuck in fight or flight. You feel deeply anxious - for me my whole body tightens up, I get stomach cramps and insomnia or sometimes violent nightmares and wake in a panic. I’m also pretty sure the suspected Crohn’s Disease I had to go to specialists for every few months for years is completely related. I’ve read up a lot about complex post traumatic stress disorder which helps and in therapy discovered I had pretty much zero handle on interoception - where you notice and understand internal sensations as signals from your nervous system.
(Anyone who finds any of this familiar I can recommend reading stuff by Pete Walker, Gabor Mate and Bessel Van Der Kolk if you haven’t already). Feeling trapped or stuck isn’t something I want to stay in, I'm not going to live in old wounds, I have way too many good things to be doing.
So I’ve discovered that after resting up and dealing with the physical weight of that type of feeling I’m best getting my anxious wee ass to a gig where I can lose my shit in the crowd and let all the big feelings bubble to the surface cos nobody else notices and if they do they’ll hug you so it’s all good. Just go to a gig, any lyric that touches a nerve, let it like a beautiful wake for the bad shit, seeing it off on it’s way for good. Just go and try to stay present, have a dance about and feel in your body again cos sober dancing sometimes feels like a magic power. It can shake away the dissociation. Everyone else is too tipsy to care what you are up to anyways but you are connecting to something good instead of being stuck with the feeling memory of someone else’s horrible actions. Would recommend for any lover of the tunes who has some heaviness to clear away. Here’s to the good ones that write bangers. Although I’d maybe save it for a bigger venue if you might lose your shit big time cos at somewhere like Sneaky’s it’s not quite so easy to ninja in your emotions. I reckon book lovers must have similar experiences freaking out in lush old dusty libraries with ornate ceilings or film buffs getting to the indie cinema for a double bill. It’s just about connecting to something that fills you up. Bit of shambolic decadence, you know. Figure this is what those hiker types are up to bagging munros and that.
And for me, packing some pants and 4 cameras (and maybe an extra lens or two but who’s counting) and getting on a plane to visit friends for a few days to play around taking portraits is the best thing for sorting out all of it. Especially when there’s a fox waiting for you at the other side. Thank you to my good friend Laura and her boy for the airport surprise, turning up in the cutest wee fox costume, my heart melted all over the place. And I can’t even deal with his wee brother’s duck outfit that she made but you had to be there.
I’m proud of myself for not slipping back into drinking or even really thinking I might want to go there, I know that it made those flashbacks way worse for me. I’m saying all of this stuff because of all the amazingly generous and supportive messages I’ve been getting. I know that folks have my back but also that saying it sometimes helps someone else to find their baws about similar struggles too. And that’s not to say everyone needs to start shouting, sometimes just getting by after heavy shit is as brave as you need to get but talking to someone can help too when the time is right for that. It’s taken me many years to get to this point with the stuff I’ve struggled with.
So now I think I have to just get louder and not hold myself back when some ideas for words and pictures start to surface around these experiences. It’s about my feelings of experiences, not about the shitty people in any ways. I was struggling for a bit with it all a few months ago, trying to focus on finding some joy in the making of things for the sake of making things, if that makes sense. I just need to let it all flow and not overthink it all, trust that my body knows when things feel right. Working on some ways to bring my writing and photography together in a more coherent way now that I feel like I have a bit of clarity. It’s good to be putting sketchbooks of poems I love together with my scribbles and chopped up contact sheets.
I’m really lucky to have people I can be honest with who don’t judge me, they just support and share their own experiences and feelings. I’m lucky to have folks who speak my language. Thanks for the useful suggestions around your own experiences too. I’ve been told to get in about some EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing) therapy so will go and investigate that a bit.
There’s a link to make donations to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre on my instagram here.
It’s been an amazing month overall for me though, investing in all the good stuff. And of course I’m having way too many ideas about how to collaborate and grow some good community vibes off the back of all the lovely messages I’ve been getting but I think I probably need to rein myself in a bit as usual and just let it all happen.
My kid and I have a tradition where we guerilla post homemade valentines around our neighbourhood for strangers to find. We went to this big garden in East Lothian and rolled down hills on the grass, did some cartwheels, fed some horses and saw a deer take a shit. We spent some time playing in the sand on our beach and we danced around a lot. He spent a solid 15 minutes one night trying to convince me that ASMR means Amazingly Satisfying Moments of Reverb and I’m sold. He’s since started whispering it at me at any given moment in all the accents he’s collecting and so far his Essex one is a winner cos he adds ‘babs’ at the end so you know where he’s meant to be from. Thinks he well Gemma Collins. He also threw up all over the bathroom in the middle of the night. Good old school holiday vibes.
March is just around the corner which feels wild cos February has just been all that stuff mixed with not enough strikes and the odd summary warrant for overdue bills I was late to pay so feels quite soon but that’s all good.
Next month I have some more portraiture work lined up and a little time to play and is it Spring yet? x
I only work with legends
Supporting evidence below. March is for portraits and adventures. See some examples here.