Why am I doing it anyway?
To be honest, I started with the end in mind, and although I love a good challenge, my goal was simple….to create a book that combines my love of photography with my life-long obsession with quotable wisdom…and what easier way to do it than one day at a time.
I’ve been collecting my favorite quotes since I was about 13 years old. Some of them came to me from my friends, some came from Readers Digest (thank you Quotable Quotes), some came from music lyrics (thank you Dan Fogelberg), others came from required reading (thank you Hermann Hesse) and many came from Bartlett’s Quotations.
As a teen, I treasured these bits of truth and steadfastly journaled them into a beautiful cloth-bound book. Over time though, I began to haphazardly stuff the clippings into the back of it until it would no longer close. What I had created, however, became a personal ‘quote-bible’ which I referred to frequently for support, wisdom and guidance. As the years passed and technology evolved, I began to log these bits of wisdom onto my computer and organize them by genre….Acceptance, Joy, Life, Parenting, Resilience, etc. and now, thanks to Google, at the touch of a button I can access an endless array of them in seconds.
The first “real” quote that I saved in my treasury was one that I found framed on the kitchen wall of my childhood friend, and it has continued to inform me throughout my life. Quotes like this have rich meaning for me and have given me peace and perspective when I needed it most.
I am frequently reminded of a quotable phrase when I see something that moves me. It can be a person, a landscape, a shimmer of light through a window, or even an architectural structure. My mind swirls with memory and truth as I am struck by the beauty of such everyday things. I feel that the meaning of a quote grows exponentially when joined with the perfect image, and so, in planning for my book and for this 365 challenge, I decided that my photographs would take the lead in the posting process.
Each day I look carefully for a meaningful subject to photograph – something that catches my eye and my heart. It’s usually not too difficult to find something special to capture, but sometimes it’s really hard to pinpoint the right quote to join it with. I can spend hours searching the internet (and my personal files) for the perfect quote, and when the two pieces come together, I get a special thrill from the connection. I often run my ideas past my favorite critic and guru (my husband, Chris) and he points me on my way with a “Yes, that’s the one!” or “Hmmmm, not exactly, but you’re getting close.”
Beth Shedd | Photography 