Life is a series of small moments
By Elizabeth Fleming
20 January 2008
"Life is a series of small moments" is an ongoing body of work about intimacy and disclosure, vulnerability and awe, and the bittersweet knowledge that everything is impermanent. I'm trying to suspend time, to document and truly notice on a deeply involved level both my everyday existence and the activities of my family, and the life that we lead in the here and now. There is heartbreak in lost time, and an ache in me as I watch my girls growing bigger so quickly. It's fleeting, but even though we all know this, it's still so continually hard to be genuinely attentive. My images are an attempt to become aware, to see the small details, to not let it all get away from me, and to confront through my camera my adoration and my sadness, the tenderness and exasperation I feel about balancing motherhood with my individual desires. My work is also related to the process of allowing myself to experience and accept a mixture of contradictory emotions, be they wonder and anxiety or boredom and gratitude.
Admittedly, there's also a part of me that's scared to reveal and/or feel too much, and perhaps this tension between showing and withholding is where the intimacy lies--not in stripping everything away, but in honoring my sometimes guarded nature. I'm riding a line, creating a push-pull in the coming together of mystery and revelation, discovery and hiding. I'm compelled to examine ordinary moments, to fight against my obsessive-compulsive rooted-in-the-mind-and-not-the-world tendencies through the act of being present behind the lens as I find poignancy in the commonplace (with occasional flashes of the theatrical). I'm there as a record-keeper, and perhaps it's through repeatedly catching these instants that I become more and more able to anticipate them, which at times gives them a cinematic or even allegorical air. But fundamentally it's about really seeing: honestly looking and observing and loving the visual, and then carefully editing and arranging my images. Each photograph has had a very particular journey, and has been fussed and sighed over and stared at until it reaches the state where I can say: "I'm ready to present it to you."
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