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, but the limitations that matter are often the ones we stumble into. You can make art anywhere, even when that anywhere isn't somewhere you would choose.

 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 my 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 waiting for little ones to  awaken, or fall asleep, or put on shoes. With a world waiting to be explored these limiting hours and limited geography feel endlessly restrictive.

 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. 

 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, 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. 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. But I still make a point to slow down and really see what images can be made from within the boundaries of that home away from home. 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 will never be about reducing or escaping limitations. Every frame is a choice and every choice excludes something. But the work isn’t always waiting on the other side of those constraints, sometimes it’s waiting inside them.