In a couple of days, this year will be over. In a couple of days I will wake up and start writing 2014 in my notebook. I will hang a new calendar on my wall, twelve new pages for twelve new months. What will the new year bring?
During a year I often feel that I should do more. I often feel that I´m not doing enough. I should be more active. I should work more. Earn more money. Be more productive, more creative, reach out to more people with my photography. That´s the thing with photography; you can always do more. I have a facebook page, I have a flickr page, I have a blog, and I create photographs. There is so much more that I could do every day. You can never do enough and feel that you´re "done". You will never be finished. And that is something that you need to accept and learn how to work with. You have to do enough, but not more than that.
When I look back at a year, I always feel like I´ve done so much more than I thought I had. This year I´ve had that usual feeling that I´m too slow and that I should push myself more and work more. But when I look back at this year, I realize what I have done and I realize that I´ve been challenged in my photography and that I´ve grown as a person. That´s not very bad!
I never get a special feeling when a year comes to an end. I just feel as always, except that I start thinking about how I want to celebrate new years eve. That´s why I felt like writing this. Because I do believe that it is special with a new year. I want to give it some kind of recognition. And by writing about how I feel for the past year, looking back at both hard times and good times, I think that I maybe can get a picture of what I want for my future year, and what I want to do different.
At the start of 2013, I was living in a small town in Sweden, studying at a school of photography for one year. In the weekends, I took the bus home for two hours to meet my family and friends. Since I moved to another town for this school, it felt important to continue my old life in my hometown by going there as often as I could. I wanted to continue to meet the friends that I usually meet and spending time with my boyfriend, even though this ment that I couldn´t spend very much time with my new class mates. This was a choice that I made, and that I´m happy with. There is a time for everything, and this year was not the year for me to get to know a lot of new people. I love meeting people, and I would have loved to know my class mates better, but you can´t put all your energy in too many places. I to put my energy where I most wanted. I choose to invest in what I already had. But I also got to know a very beautiful person in my class who is now my dear friend and also an amazing photographer: Victoria Söderström. We started liking each other already before the school started, because we found out that we liked the same photographers and had the same artistic style. Getting to know someone through your passion creates a special bond, which is something that I´ve learned this year!
At the beginning of this year I created a book as part of a school project. I named it Clouds and Above and I choose to include my most dreamy, poetic and imaginative pictures in it. Seeing my pictures in a beautiful, printed book for the first time was amazing! If you want to see a preview of the book or order it you can click here.
In april me and Victoria packed a car full of props, wigs and dresses and drove to the countryside for our project "Roots of imagination". We spent five days in my family´s house, photographing as much as we could. Sometimes we assisted each other on the shoot, and sometimes we modeled for each other. These days were so amazing and so inspiring, and it´s definitely something that I want to do again. Being together with another person who is prepared to do almost anything in order for you to get the perfect picture, that´s an amazing feeling! We also did a movie about this project.
Here´s some behind the scenes photos from the project:
Victoria on her way to a photoshoot with a bag and red fabric.
Some of the props we brought with us.
I borrowed Victorias wig for a self portrait!
Victoria with my favorite prop of all time: the bubble!
Victoria shooting on ice up in the forest.
I carried a table out on the fields to shoot this picture.
I created a lot of pictures from this project. Here are some of them:
After one year my school ended in june. I longed home so I was happy to go back home.
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