I made a discovery this week, right after I hung a print you all voted on, and it was both very personal and extremely obvious.
Rituals are my religion. Not the wellness kind of rituals. The kind where you decide in advance that a smell or a song or a genuinely disgusting drink is going to mean something cool to you later, and then you go plot a way to remember it.
Memory doesn’t actually live in photographs. Are you surprised to hear a photographer say that? It lives in the body. The rituals I love best plant a trigger on purpose, while the thing is still happening. Photo or otherwise.
These rituals are my love language and possibly my life’s work. (Too dramatic? Probably.)
Read on to reveal:
The perfume trick that turns any trip into a door you can walk back through
Four notes that hundreds of pop songs are quietly using, and why your kids will hear them forever
The ruined shoot day that produced my favorite print
What a first bite does to a person’s face, and why I’m always ready for it
A confession that could get me thrown out of the olive oil industry
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Smell: How to Bottle a Trip
I started doing this by accident, and now I do it on purpose.
In 2006, before six weeks in India, I bought a dry shampoo on the theory that showers might be few and far between. The bonus of the Stila Jade Blossom Hair Refresher (discontinued! I use this one now!) was that it smelled incredible. I used it every day of that trip.
Then I got home and realized I’d accidentally built myself a door. One poof of that product and I’m in Kerala. No warning, no permission asked.
So. Before your next flight, find a perfume you’ve never worn before. Something you genuinely love, so smell it first, don’t order blind. Buy it, then don’t touch it until you land.
On your first morning in Paris, or Malta, or wherever you are: spray it. Then every morning after, for the whole trip.
The scent gets woven in with everything else your body is taking in. The light, the language, the food, the slightly different person you are when nobody from home can see you.
Then months later you spray it on an ordinary rainy morning and away you go.
My current beloved is DS & Durga Rose Atlantic, a gift from my bestie Kiyuki. It’s the one I do the shoulder shimmy with. Makes me feel energetic and enigmatic, which is a lot to ask of a bottle.
And three more perfumes with descriptions so vivid I’m obsessed despite never having smelled them:
Sound: How to Bottle a Decade
Same trip, different door. On my trip to India, I made a playlist. The standouts were this Regina Spektor song, and this John Frusciante one. Twenty years later (eeeek!) I can still hear both songs.
Make the trip a playlist, play it in your ears the whole time, but not until you leave on that first day.
But music does something perfume can’t. A scent holds a place. A playlist can hold an entire era. We all have songs we’ve claimed as ours, and at some point they stop being music and start being identity. (If I tell you I loved No Doubt and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you know exactly how old I am, don’t you.)
Our kids are recording theirs right now, and not one of us can hear it yet.
Which brings me to something genuinely unhinged: a video identifying the Gen Alpha melody. Gen Alpha is our kids’ generation. This video identifies a sequence of four notes that hundreds of recent pop songs are all using! It shows the songs all stitched together, and they’re… all the same? It’s pretty wild.
Every generation gets a melody that will someday drop them straight back into being nine, or seventeen, and it’s looking like theirs might be a hundred versions of the same one.
Give it five minutes. Fascinating.
Sight: How a Ruined Shoot Day Made My Favorite Print
Two rituals from earlier issues just paid off, and both of them are hanging on walls now.
First, the vote. A few issues back I asked you to pick which water photo should go up in my house, and you did, in a landslide. It’s framed. It’s up. I look at it every single morning.
Here’s what I never told you about that picture. I shot it on a ruined day. I was photographing the Sag Harbor wharf for the Chamber of Commerce; the brief called for blue sky, and the sky was having absolutely none of it. We rescheduled the whole shoot. But while the sky sulked, the water was doing something extraordinary, and the frame I got on the day that didn’t work for the client is the one that’s now 30x40 on my wall.
I think about that a lot. The assignment failed. The photograph did not. I may have absorbed too many therapy infographics, but finding beauty in an unexpected turn is my new favorite sport.
Second, the little frame. In June, I told you about the Day-After Move: pick your best photo from a holiday, order it that same week, hide it in a closet until you need a gift. This is mine, from Father’s Day, from the morning we went to see the vintage airplanes. It lives on my husband’s desk now.
Both of these are simply memories I decided to engineer instead of hoping I’d remember.
Gesture: The Moment Just Before
Some clients hand you a shot list. Fancy Peasant handed me a boat.
We took it to a deserted bank of Hamptons sand, climbed a literal wall of it, and found a spot at the top that looks like a still from a daydream. (This is the olive oil I keep on my counter, so you can imagine my composure.)
Here’s the gesture part. Faces perform. Bodies don’t. So I spend most of a shoot handing people something pointless to do with their bodies, and I shoot on 1, never on 3, because by 3 everyone has arranged themselves.
BTS bonus: it’s not often that getting the shot makes a better video than the shot did.
Taste: Eat the Thing
I need to tell you something and I need you to stay calm.
I don’t like olives.
I love olive oil. LOVE. I have a bottle I don’t let anyone cook with. I can wax poetic about its polyphenols (they’re present in olive oil, and also, blessedly, in coffee!). But the olive fruit itself? No, thank you. And I cannot explain it, because I love everything else on the mezze table. Pungent stuff, fermented things, pickled, briny, and funky things. Bring all of it. Just not those.
Corfu, 2000. I was nineteen, and it was the first time I had ever left the United States.
I remember it in all of my senses. Pastel walls, in hues that glowed from within, the kind of color you cannot get out of a paint can. Grilled fish. Fresh cheese. Goats wandering past like they had somewhere to be. Old women with perfect leather skin.
Hearty, back-clapping hellos between men, radiating a kind of joy I don't often see in octogenarians. The whole place read as healthy and happy in a way I had not previously understood was available to a person.
And olives. Constantly. On every table, in every dish, at every hour of the day.
In spite of myself, I ate them all week.
Not because I came around on them. I did not come around on them. I ate them because I was standing in the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and I was not going to miss out on living like a local over a teeny tiny thing like a gag reflex.
Somewhere in there, a local poured me a shot of ouzo and stood there, waiting. It tasted like a licorice candle someone had set on fire. I do not like black licorice either. Down the hatch.
Here’s the thing about taste I think gets missed.
Smell happens to you. Sound happens to you. You can walk past a bakery and be nine years old again with no say in the matter. Taste is the only one that asks your permission first. Somebody has to offer it, and you have to open your mouth on purpose.
That’s why it sticks so hard. You weren’t a bystander. You agreed.
I have never ordered ouzo again in my life. But I can still tell you what that Greek terrace smelled like (the salty sea!), what the chairs were made of (plastic!), and exactly who I thought I was that summer. (A mermaid)
And then there’s the photographer’s reason for trying new and weird tastes, which is the best reason, IMO. The face a person makes at a first bite is the exact face I spend whole shoots hunting. Unguarded, mid-motion, honest for about half a second. You cannot pose it. You can only be ready for it.
So eat the thing. Then hand the weird thing to someone you love and have your camera up.
Anyway. Scroll back up and look at those Fancy Peasant frames again. I made that olive oil look like a religious experience and I meant every single frame.
But I’m still not eating the olives.
Ooh: One more door
Write a letter to your future self.
You can date it for a year out, or five, or leave it undated and let it ambush you.
I got this from Austin Kleon’s newsletter this week, who got it from The Traveling Bookbinder. (Kleon wrote Steal Like an Artist, the book that literally every creative I knew was obsessed with in 2012, me very much included.)
Would you actually do it? I would. I already know what I’d tell her.
Substacks I loved this week
A permanent place to build an art habit for the whole family!
I learned about the French ritual of rentrée in the Fall from Frosso’s Substack, and I loved this reframe on Back to School idea. Frosso is a Greek magazine editor living in Paris and writing about all things Parisian. Immediate follow.
The Seventh Pic
Of the many memes I had in my IG Stories this week, this one where a dad makes real songs with lyrics his toddler writes got the most DMs. (Linked instead of embedded because Substack is glitching this week, eek!)
So that’s the discovery. I’m not documenting my life so much as booby-trapping it. A scent, a song, a print on the wall, a first bite. Little doors all over the place so future me can walk back through.
Pick one this week. Buy the perfume before the trip, not after. Play the album only in the car. Order the print on the Monday after the holiday. Hand somebody the weird thing and have your camera up.
Then tell me which sense you’re using. I want to know what you’re planting.
Heart the heart, even if you normally don’t! (thank you)
hugs!!
Ana
Oh just saw this, thanks so much for the mention Ana! I wish you an excellent rentrée🤍
I love this💞. I usually buy a scent on the trip or find some cute candle or smell to tie it all back.