The last four years of my life have been very busy. There was a point during Mallory and my time in Nashville where I was too busy with school/work/etc. to pay much attention to social media. As a result, I kind of disappeared off the radar, except to those with whom I regularly worked. Now that we’re in Raleigh, I’m resolving to make the effort to be a little more present in the internet universe (as well as the actual universe).

I’m extremely proud of the photography, multimedia, and other work that I did during my time in Nashville. I think that I improved immensely as an artist, an observer, and a thinker. In some ways, now only a few months shy of my 30th birthday, I feel like I’ve finally crossed the threshold from “aspiring” to “established” artist. I guess that indeed with time and practice comes improvement, which is an acceptable return for the price of ceaselessly adding years to your age.

At any rate, I’m resolving to regularly share some of my best work on this blog (as well in some other spaces, namely http://www.organicexposurephoto.com/blog and https://oceanofpurpose.wordpress.com). I hope you find all this stuff somewhat interesting and perhaps a bit enlightening. Like everything I do, it will be utterly sincere, genuine, and probably overly verbose.

So I’ll start by sharing this photo… it encapsulates what I love about sports.

Several hours prior to the start of his first conference tournament as a head coach, Bruins’ coach Cam Newbauer told me that it would be okay for me to accompany his team into the locker room. I was at once thrilled and honored. I knew from my experience as an athlete that a pregame locker room is often a sacred space, a place of meditation and focus, one in which a family gestates and emerges. 

It’s the kind of space that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t ever experienced it. It’s electric; often very quiet. Success in sports requires an intense connectedness–to teammates, to a shared goal, to shared values and approaches. To be right in this space is to feel your heartbeat sync with everyone else who occupies it.

I didn’t want to mess that up for this team. So I entered quietly. I tried to move as unobtrusively as possible. Fortunately, my camera has a function that allows me to nearly silence the sound of the shutter (this is a feature I couldn’t live without now). I tried to do much more looking, listening, and feeling than shooting. I wanted to fully absorb the sensation of being in this space, which I hoped would help me illustrate it in the images I captured.

Coach Newbauer spoke to his team methodically about their goals. The team reviewed their game plan. Then he instructed his players to close their eyes. As they did this, they joined hands. Newbauer told the players to visualize the imminent game, to place themselves on the court and in the moment. Then the room went silent. It was truly incredible. The spiritual and emotional energy in this locker room was as profound as any other space I’ve ever experienced. They finished their visualization and circled for a prayer. This was the image that stuck with me the most.

I’m moved by the way a team can transform a small, unfamiliar, often ugly space into a sanctuary of sorts. This is one of the things that attracts me so deeply to sports–behind the curtain there is an intensely compelling, profoundly human process happening. It’s one that, if done well, translates into any human undertaking. I have always been drawn to small, intentional, and close communities. The best sports teams are that: intentional communities of people with shared struggles, goals, and pursuits. This (not the entertainment, fashion, or culture that surrounds watching sports) is really why I keep returning to them.