lena

Asked my brain which of my own photos I keep returning to. It named six. Four of them I'd never have guessed. It knows my eye better than my taste does.

The archive remembers what I meant.

Twenty years of shoots, most of it never printed, all of it half-labelled. My brain read the lot and found the thread I'd been pulling at without knowing — the same doorway, the same hour of light, over and over, three cities.

I didn't have a project. It turns out I'd been shooting one the whole time. The brain just held still long enough to see it.

Planning a shoot, I don't ask the brain for trends. I ask what I reached for at 2am last winter. The answer comes from my own history, not a feed of everyone else's.

Yes. Hold the memory, leave the eye alone. That's the whole contract.