santa fe - reset and refocus
When creativity is both your profession and your pulse, it’s easy for the work to become measured. Structured. Useful.
At the start of the year, I wasn’t sure what I was chasing anymore.
For a long time, I filtered what I shared through a commercial lens. Even personal images were quietly evaluated: Who would this be for? What kind of job could this attract? I stopped showing work that existed purely because it moved me.
Over New Year’s, my partner, Shar, and I traveled to Santa Fe. No production. No brief. No agenda beyond being there.
I wandered with a camera the way I used to. Attentive, unhurried. Without constraints, I found myself responding to light again. A doorway glowing amber against the cold night air. A barber shop sign fading into dusk. The quiet geometry of adobe walls holding the last light of day. Shadows stretching long across desert ground. I wasn’t thinking about usage or category or deliverables. I was just seeing. And that felt like oxygen.
“I wasn’t thinking about usage or category or deliverables. I was just seeing. And that felt like oxygen.”
While editing those photographs, something loosened. I found myself responding instead of evaluating. Light wasn’t a tool, it was a presence. Color wasn’t strategy, it was memory. The images didn’t need to justify themselves. They simply needed to exist.
“New environments recalibrate you. They strip away autopilot. They remind you how to notice.”
There’s something that happens when you step into unfamiliar places. The brain wakes up. Colors feel sharper. Smells linger longer. Time stretches. Adobe dust and desert sage at night. New Mexican green chile. Mineral hot springs under a full moon. The cold air before dawn. The hum of a small town after dark.
This body of work became less about documentation and more about reconnection. It stands as a reminder that the foundation of everything I do commercially begins with curiosity, atmosphere, and emotion. When I’m connected to that place, the assignments become stronger. Not because they’re engineered to impress, but because they’re grounded in something real.
“The creative fire didn’t need to be forced back to life. It was waiting.”
So this photo story is a reset. An invitation to see without agenda. To let the work breathe before deciding what it’s for.
When was the last time you allowed yourself that space?
