The Balcony Project: A Study in Limitations
Waikiki Beach
Photography is about limitations. By its very nature it is an art of exclusion; limited by the frame, each image a decision about what doesn’t belong. Technical limitations get the attention- focal length, sensor size, shutter speed, iso- as if they are the boundaries that shape our work. But the limitations that matter are more often the ones we stumble into: A hotel room. A sleeping Child. A missed sunset. You can make art anywhere, even when that anywhere isn't somewhere you would chose.
Van Gogh painted in spite of his personal struggles with mental health, continuing the paint throughout the year he spent confined to an asylum in Sothern France. His world became smaller, reduced largely to the asylum grounds, yet some of his most enduring work came from that season of limitation. His iconic Stary Night captures the night sky outside his asylum window. Limitation has never been the opponent of creativity, more often it is its catalyst.
I have traveled with children since they were babies and traveling with young children has its own geography. Even as the world grows- new placed explored through the eyes of little people- it shrinks around nap schedules and early bedtimes. Every trip included hours spent in hotel rooms, limiting hours, limited geography, waiting for little ones to awaken, or fall asleep, or put on shoes.
In these rooms the balcony project was born. I call it a project somewhat reluctantly, These photographs aren't especially cohesive. They weren't made with a shot list, a plan, or an artist statement. They'll likely never hang as a formal collection. Some belong to other bodies of work. Their only common thread is where they were made: from hotel windows and balconies, in the hours when, for a little while, I couldn't travel any farther.
Waikiki Beach
I sat on my balcony, overlooking Waikiki beach, while my preschooler slept off a long day in the sun. I photographed that same shoreline nearly every day of the two weeks we were on the island: empty in the early pre-dawn hours, busy with swimmers in the afternoon sun, quiet and still as the sun set over the water. I stood on that beach, camera in hand, day after day, but it's this image (top) , taken from the balcony while my little one slept, that remains my favorite. Weeks of unlimited possibilities folded into this little 4 foot balcony and became the image that best captures this iconic shore.
San Francisco, California
Another favorite was taken out the window of the club lounge of the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. A long day exploring, three hungry, exhausted kids, and the golden light as the sun began to lower across the bay. We retreated to the hotel club for snacks, hoping to make it back out once everyone recovered. We never made it. I picked up my camera and photographed the city through that hotel window. This image, the one taken in a place I didn't want to be, at a time I didn't want to be there, was published in Fuji Life and remains one of my most popular images. A photograph made not in spite of limitations, but because of them
The same is true of my Water Colors series. A hotel balcony overlooking the Pacific. A tripod. A stack of neutral density filters. And one thing I had in abundance while waiting for a child to awake: time. I don't know that I would have stood still long enough to make twenty- or forty-minute exposures if I hadn't been confined to that room. But those quiet hours became the beginning of a series that I still return to whenever I'm fortunate enough to find myself overlooking the sea.
Pacific Ocean- Carmel Highlands, California
My children are older now. They can outlast me exploring cities, and the photographs I make from hotel windows are no longer born from necessity. They're made because years of limitation taught me to stop long enough to notice what was always there.
As I write this, I'm sitting in my car waiting for one child to finish camp. Waiting has become its own landscape: parking lots, ball fields, empty sidewalks, rows of parked cars catching the evening light. I catch myself wondering whether there's another project hiding here.
Photography has never really been about escaping limitations. Every frame is one. Every choice excludes something. Maybe the work isn't waiting on the other side of our constraints, maybe it's waiting inside them.
