As seen in Dear Photographer Magazine | Jan 2019
“I feel a responsibility to my backyard. I want it to be taken care of and protected.”
- Annie Leibovitz
We drove back into town as a family 8 days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall. The eye of the largest hurricane in Texas history, barrelled through my backyard. The light the morning of our return was an electric, staticky, grey. Chills covered my body as my jaw dropped the closer to Rockport we got. There was no color. There were no leaves on the trees, they’d all been blown clean off. The ground was a muddy grey, scarred with paths of tornadoes, tree trunks and debris. The only color we could see was the shocks of yellow crying out from every broken tree branch and torn tree trunk. During the first few weeks and months of recovery I tried my hardest to use my photography as a way to process and cope, but my work was forced and I was hurting. I was glad to have something familiar to turn to daily, but communication with my camera was only roughly understood through the stranglehold grief and uncertainty had on us. Unable to tell our story the way I wanted to, I watched outsiders attempt. They wanted to project a connection to our pain, showcasing the most shocking images they could compose. Sad stories sell, and there was a slew of them strewn across our city.In the beginning of my career, I aimed to imitate the fine art film photographers who dominated my feeds. Elizabeth Messina, Lexia Frank, and Jose Villa curated a palette that I found desirable and tried to force into my daily shooting with a Nikon D70 - it wasn’t quite the same. I eventually followed another trend of muted and muddy tones for a spell before landing on trying to create images that were true to what my eye saw. But still, living in a coastal vacation getaway didn’t provide the backdrop to the moody and mysterious aesthetic I was often drawn to, as a daily-life shooter. I didn’t know how to harness the colors of my town. I didn’t know how to tell their story.The generations of photographers before me who had galleries and shops of their own, defined the use of color and light in Rockport. It was to be used in highly saturated doses as the centerpiece of a sunrise or sunset, or the gaudy frame to every image of a bird, fish, or flower captured within the county. I did not want to abide by these rules, so I refused to play the game. Until I decided to challenge the story the media was telling about us. We needed people to come play on our beaches, take fishing charters, log the birds and flowers (that HAD come back!) in their nature journals. We needed a tourism boost and the sob stories weren’t painting a desirable picture.When powerful wind and rain and sand strip away every fleck of paint, and the sun bleaches out the rest, every spot of color pops. I started paying attention to those pops. I let myself get sucked into the sunsets that melted from the heavens to the horizon. I started to understand the drama and power that comes with using a full spectrum of colors and used that to tell a richer story. Through posting colorful images with encouraging updates on my social media platforms, I feel like I’ve played my part in our recovery efforts. I couldn’t help clean up debris in the immediate aftermath, I had to keep my babies at a safe distance. I couldn’t help rebuild while I was trying to hold the pieces of a “normal” daily routine together for my daughters. But I can tell a story, and why would I limit my vocabulary to a few trendy tones?