Everyday Spaces, Everyday Objects
The slow season is still here, but it has started to feel less like a gap and more like a room to work in. The pace has eased just enough that there’s time not only to make new photographs, but to sit with the ones that already exist and ask what they’re pointing toward next.
Lately that work has brought me back into the studio—same desk, same screens, same hard drives—but with a different goal. Instead of just moving files from card to client, the focus now is on understanding what I’m actually drawn to when there are no deadlines pushing the process along.
Where the work comes together
Most of what happens with the camera eventually ends up here. Client projects, personal walks with film, trips to new towns—they all return to this space to be sorted, edited, and decided on.
For years, this part of the process has been efficient by design. Import, cull, edit, export, move on. The edits were careful, but the rhythm was fast. Now, after a season of slowing down in the field—shooting film, walking new streets, breaking geographic habits—it feels wrong to rush once the work hits the computer.
If the point is to see more clearly, then the studio has to slow down too.
So post lives here: surrounded by images, looking for the threads that connect them, and asking what they say about where the work is heading.
Everyday spaces, everyday objects
One thread that keeps showing up is how often the camera has been pointed at everyday places and spaces. Not just signature buildings or big gestures, but the in‑between spots: corridors, job sites, side streets, the edges where real life happens around architecture.
That realization has led to a new question: if the work is already drawn to everyday spaces, what happens if the focus shifts to everyday objects too?
The paint roller on a construction site. The same roller later in someone’s garage at home. Tools stacked in a truck bed. A row of worn boots by the door. The consumable products people run through without thinking—the things that make the spaces function but rarely end up in the final photographs.
Those are the images the studio work is starting to circle around now.
Not to make a catalog of objects, but to see whether photographing the things we touch every day can say something honest about the people and spaces they belong to.
Looking for patterns in the archive
With that in mind, the archive feels different. Instead of just searching for “best shots,” the question becomes: where have these everyday objects already been sneaking into the frame? Which images were overlooked because they felt too ordinary at the time?
Some files that would have been skipped before suddenly feel important. A paint-splattered ladder leaning in a corner. A stack of materials waiting to be installed. A half‑used roll of tape on a dusty windowsill. They’re not showpieces, but they’re part of the story.
Laying these images out next to the more polished architectural work starts to reveal something: the photographs feel more grounded when the evidence of real use—a roller, a broom, a worn tool—shows up inside the frame. The space stops being just a design and becomes something lived in.
Letting this change future work
None of this stays theoretical for long. The point of Reflective Thoughts isn’t just to think differently; it’s to let that thinking reshape how future work happens.
So as new projects and personal shoots are planned, this idea of “everyday objects” is coming along for the ride. On client jobs, that might mean leaving a little room in the schedule to notice the tools and materials that tell the story of how a space is made or used. On personal days, it might mean building small studies—series around paint rollers, worn tools, or other consumables that quietly trace the life of a place.
Back in the studio, those choices will show up. The edits will either reflect this shift toward everyday objects or they won’t. The selects will either include that roller in the corner, or they’ll crop it out.
That’s why this episode belongs here, at the desk, with the work laid out: this is where intentions turn into habits, and habits turn into the photographs that actually leave the studio.
Reflective Thoughts began as a way to put words to these shifts—to trace how slowing down, shooting film, breaking geographic patterns, and now paying attention to everyday objects might change the work over time. Being back in the studio with all of that in mind feels like the next necessary step: not just making more images, but deciding more carefully what they’re really about.
