People & Places Of 2023
“You know, we really don’t need to go into a gallery to see beauty. Florence is the gallery.”
My Turkish friend, Ayca, and I sat atop the infamous stairs of Michelangelo’s Square; miniature bottles of red wine in hand. Picture this with me.
You’ve spent the last 8 hours roaming by foot, but you muster up the energy to climb just 2 km up a winding backroad to overlook the city of art. Imagine a mountaintop of Florence, Italy, just before sunset. Whereas you felt like a mere speck by the cathedral earlier, the cathedral and entire city now serve as mere specks as you gaze below. If you’ve been to Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, imagine just that, but a country of old, Italian beauty, much less metropolitan, and a Holy hush of sorts. You kick off your shoes, stretch out on the stairs warmed by the afternoon heat, and feel your entire body melt into a celestial trance of sorts. Your feet are dirt ridden and disgusting. You smell like a blend of sweat and leftover perfume. Your soul is at ease.
Just a few stairs below, a man strums his guitar. It echoes throughout the mountaintop. Beams of sunshine pierce through the clouds’ evening haze. You wonder for a brief moment if you just ascended to eternal Glory. It’s about a hundred people packed together. Yet, there’s a peculiar quietness, despite the crowd. There’s a soft spoken chatter, but everyone is admiring, appreciating, listening. There’s a reverence that’s felt among everyone, but towards what, exactly? Beside you, a young woman closes her eyes as she sways to the guitar’s melancholic rhythm. She wipes tears from her eyes. But she’s smiling. On the other side, two girls stare into the distance, awestruck. You’ve never experienced Heaven, but right now, it feels so familiar and so close. The people surrounding you feel familiar too. You all share something in common, but what, exactly? Last year, you wept from physical and emotional pain that felt inescapable. Today, you and the weeping woman catch each other’s eye for just a nanosecond…and you cry too. But today, you cry from beauty; a beauty so captivating and so Holy that it seems to breathe life into your very soul. It’s a beauty that can be felt.
No one looks down at their phone. Everyone looks out. It’s as if Florence itself is the movie screen. Together, a melting pot of nationalities and strangers suddenly share common ground. Together, despite differing religious beliefs and ethnic contrasts and cultural backgrounds, you all gather together and admire, appreciate, and savor one thing:
Beauty.
Photography and the many faces in front of my lens remind me of this very moment in Florence. People are fascinating and beautiful just as they are. They don’t need a specific BMI or makeup or social class or cool clothes or any 21st century pressured facade to be “human enough”. Florence doesn’t need a gallery because Florence is the gallery. And people, by their Divine imprints, are the gallery in and of themselves.
When people rest in their natural state of being, when they feel free or focused or forget your lens is freezing some time on them, there is something raw and sacred that happens. Being in front of a lens can make you feel naked and ashamed. Suddenly, you’re hyperaware of your own self. It can feel vulnerable and awkward. It can bring feelings of unworthiness to surface. And that is precisely why photography is so powerful. My greatest joy is to show people what I see when I see them. In them, I see a beauty so far deeper than their flesh.
I see beauty in the mangled feet of a dancer, the tears of a bride’s father, the trusting cling of a child to its mother, the grit and sweat of a runner. I see beauty in the scars and laugh lines and the stories behind the faces. In a world where our sadistic side hobby is to often stand before a mirror, pinch our sides, loathe our skin, wish for something to change, photography is that still, small voice that says,
“Maybe you just need to see yourself in a different light.”
As someone who spent six years loathing her body image, imprisoned to voices that said, “Just lose 5 more pounds,” unattainable demands, and that my worth and identity were sealed in doing more, being more, yet still not being enough…I understand. Mirrors and cameras and I had a toxic relationship, but almost two years ago, a camera became my lifeline. Beauty became balm to my soul. In 2022, my personal life fell a part and I landed in an unthinkable crisis.
My mental health plummeted to levels I never thought possible. To cope, I simultaneously relapsed into old habits on top of the uncontrollable circumstances in my life. I couldn’t eat, sleep, or function. I felt anything but beautiful. I felt broken. Numb. Lifeless. No swig of alcohol or therapy session could quash the turmoil I wanted to escape. The idea of non-existence sounded more enticing than a spa day. In my photo recap from last year, I shared more of my story from that time, but my saving grace - God’s grace - was my camera and experiencing beauty in others. In one of my darker moments, I prayed for beauty from pain. Little did I know, a camera, a girl and her open heart, and some honesty in the “inner demons” of her pain, her angst, the thorn in her flesh, would be the beginning of a life she thought was unredeemable. It did not heal me by some superpower, but when I felt deeply unseen, it made me feel seen.
I forced myself to sit in front of my camera and create, even when I didn’t feel like it, when I was at my worst, and when I was my most unattractive. Yet in my brokenness, God so tenderly opened my eyes to see beauty among my own cracks. I assumed some of the rather grotesque and darker images would push people away. Instead, I felt like Hagar when she is found in the wilderness and proclaims, “You are the God who sees me.” The more I allowed my ugliest, most unfiltered parts to be exposed to light - and in photography, this is quite literal - the more freedom I found. When I photographed others and saw them so alive and free and beautiful…
“If I see it in them,” I thought, “Maybe that same beauty is within me too.”
Have you ever felt seen?
It is terrifying. And it is powerful. I pray that every human being, at some point in time, experiences the soul quashing weight of what it is like to feel really, truly seen and known.
Photography is the reminder that you can come as you are. You are interesting as you are. You are fascinating as you are. You are beautiful as you are. You are enough as you are. So, come as you are. You need not add more to that. Your beauty and worth are not equated to how much you can plaster on or shred of yourself. No number of hairs on your head or makeup on your face or number on the scale determines how lovable, how beautiful, how worthy, how captivating you are. The fact that you are a human being, reflective of your Maker, is enough.
Just as Florence is the gallery, so are you. You are a walking, living, breathing, human masterpiece. You need not do more, be more, or add more.
You are the art. You are the gallery. You are the beauty.
My friends, I invite you to stay a while to admire and appreciate the beauty of some of my favorite moments captured in 2023.
