Hey creatives! This week I sat down with photographer
for the podcast (listen here). I really admire Ari’s work. He photographs life as it happens, intuitively, and lets time do its thing. What starts as instinct in the moment turns into something meaningful later. The mundane becomes special with time. You’re left with an archive that, years later, tells a story about a place and the person capturing it. It reveals who you were, what mattered to you, and how you once saw the world.A few days after our chat, my mum handed me an old external hard drive that I thought was long gone, lost in the chaos of moving to Germany a decade ago. After talking to Ari, I couldn’t not plug it in and go hunting for my old photos. And I was hunting for something very specific.
Back in 2007, sixteen-year-old me went on a two week trip with my mum around China, armed with both a camcorder and a tiny point-and-shoot. That trip, and the time I got to spend with my mum, is incredibly special to me. It also meant the start of a new hobby, photography, something that’s stayed in my life ever since, and it sparked a lifelong love of travel. And yet I had not looked at those photos for at least 15 years.
To my surprise, the drive worked, and buried in its folders I found literally thousands of photos of the trip. It’s fair to say I was documenting absolutely everything, mundane or not.
Looking at those photos now, I can’t say they’re masterpieces, but they carry so much meaning. It’s like peering through a little window at a previous version of myself, one that was curious, shy, and completely in love with a new hobby.
Seeing those images made me think about all the other things I’m creating now without knowing exactly why or where they’re going. That’s something I catch myself asking a lot, whether it’s with a specific project like this newsletter, or life in general.
Even though you always hear “journey, not destination”, that’s never been me. I always want to know the destination. But Ari’s way of working, and rediscovering those old images have given me something concrete: the idea of building up an archive of work to look back on with a different lens. I like the idea that future-me might stumble across these words or photos and appreciate them in ways I can’t imagine now.
We trust ourselves in the moment to do the work that feels intuitively right, and trust our future selves to figure out where it’s going.
Savouring the mundane feels like a small superpower and a way to enjoy the present. That’s been another nice byproduct of this. I’ve been picking up the camera more and capturing the small moments in daily life. Trying to embrace the idea of not knowing where it’s all headed, but trusting that it’s worth doing anyway. Building something worth revisiting, even when we don’t know what it’s for yet.
Perhaps this post will be a little reminder to future-me if he forgets that again.
If you want to listen to the full episode with Ari, you can listen on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Full show notes here.)