What does it mean to really see? How often are we really able to let something be exactly as it is, and to find the indestructible light or beauty in the darkest (or ugliest) places.

This week we will turn to an essay from the Kinship Book Series by Trebbe Johnson, titled The Coal Remembers.

Trebbe reflects on the broken and scared “bare, black hill of coal waste” along Sterry Creek. Here, Trebbe struggles to find the beauty within the decimated land until she allows herself to be “drawn into the vulnerability that's communicated beneath first impressions of the one before me, I soften. My defenses slip. It dawns on me that, wherever I look, I will see a life that is etched with some hurt, even if the scars aren't always visible. It's true of places no less than people. In that suffering and survival, I see beauty and discover something like love.”

Photography is just like that.

Enjoy the full essay here.

Call-for-engagement:

Find something unloved in your own community. Something ignored, neglected, despised, or pushed aside. Spend time there. Letting go of judgment or any need to fix, heal or convert, explain, or romanticize. Treat this place like a beloved other that is beyond repair. Maybe the way you would sit with a dying friend who is beyond cure. Can you feel the edges of your ability to accept it as it is? Record whatever emotions arise. Maybe anger, sadness, frustration, helplessness, despair, outrage, depression, etc. Stay with whatever arises without needing to fix it and when the time feels right, make at least ten photographs.