I have a confession to make. This virus knocked me off my stride and impacted me in ways, and to a degree, that I didn’t expect. Even as I’m writing this, I know that there are others out there who have been impacted far more profoundly than I have. Some have lost a job, a business, the chance to celebrate a life-changing moment with those you care about, a home, perhaps even a loved one. The last thing I would ever want to do is minimize those losses. I know I’m fortunate not to have lost something so dear, and so my loss of optimism left me feeling even more disappointed in myself for letting it “get to me.” As someone who has moved 10 times in as many years, lived on four continents, and visited dozens more, I generally prided myself on being a flexible, unflappable, global nomad.
However, as a photographer who primarily focuses on travel and nature photography, the inability to move, explore, and be out in the world, shooting and discovering new cultures and natural wonders felt not just suffocating, but like a loss of purpose. As a localized outbreak became a global pandemic, I watched as all my hopes for the coming months crumbled. A year of careful planning to make a long camping and photography road-trip to see many of America’s National Parks for the first time and to visit dear friends fell apart. As those close to me suffered losses of their own, I felt it would be wrong (and insensitive) to even share images from my portfolio from past travels.
I shut down. I stopped shooting. I stopped posting. I just couldn’t see how to wrap my mind around the scale of this thing and how anything I did could even matter or make any difference.
Eventually, after the shock of it subsided, and I—like many others—adjusted to a “new normal,” I felt a void inside that was itching to be filled. So, one day, I reached for my camera and didn’t really know what I was aiming for at first: I just wanted to feel like myself again. I started shooting ordinary objects and scenes around me. I decided that even if I had to stay in one place, that there was always something interesting to capture if I just had the eyes to see it.
Finally, it came to me: maybe I could do something that would help. Maybe I could share some of the beauty I had noticed in my (now much smaller) world that just might bring joy to others and inspire them to see their own world with new eyes. Maybe there is something to actually observing life, close and small, that can reveal a hidden beauty in the world and the people around you. Something you normally would’ve passed over, or taken for granted, that now you have the opportunity to notice. No matter where you are, or what you’re facing, I hope you can find something interesting, perhaps even beautiful in its own peculiar way, in your world.
Will you join me? Can you find #BeautyWhereYouAre ? If you want to help, please share this post and images with others and feel free to share examples of the beauty you have discovered in your everyday by commenting below with #BeautyWhereYouAre.
And if you want to see the next images of my #BeautyWhereYouAre project, follow me on IG: @CarissaGonzalezPhotography and Facebook: @CarissaGPhotography . My full gallery can be browsed here.
COVID-19 UPDATE: A portion of the proceeds from ALL sales from my entire gallery are going to local community non-profits providing frontline COVID-19 relief! Thank you for your support and for helping to spread the word!
“Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature . . . they do close and small and, as it were, in focus what God at other times does so large that men do not attend to it.”
C.S. Lewis
