My Fallow Year
Polytunnels, Cyanotypes and forgetting that I put the kettle on.
My Fallow Year of 2024 came and went. Was it a quieter year? Did I feel well rested at the end of it? Am I suddenly transformed into a person who doesn’t overthink, overplan and can act spontaneously? Ha ha, no. Really not.
My whole thinking behind declaring 2024 to be a Fallow Year and writing a post about it back in February of last year (see post here) was that, whilst I whilst spending the previous couple of years working on and exhibiting my project ‘Where the Red Kite Flies’ was enormously creatively stimulating and satisfying, it also left me feeling a bit wrung out mentally and artistically. I felt like a bit of a break was in order.
But what ended up happening was that it was one of my busiest years for my commercial, interior photography work. One of my favourite humans, my cousin’s daughter Savannah, left me a voice message recently and used the phrase ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’. I think in the past I may have felt a little rebellion against this phrase, thinking that I like being idle damn it! But what I found last year is that I’m not actually very good at doing nothing. So instead of throwing myself into the documentary side of my photography practice, I threw myself into the work side. I’m lucky in that I love this side of my photography as well and find it fullfilling in a different way from my project based work.
I think that I had thought that I’d emerge from my fallow year refreshed, full of ideas and having learnt to play better.
Perhaps it’s a bit like how you shouldn’t have too many preconceived ideas about the outcomes of a project before you start them. Thinking that I knew what my fallow year SHOULD look like wasn’t helpful, though it perhaps served as a bit of a guide. I knew I wanted to be more playful but the unexpected things that came out of it were possibly more important. It also goes back to my planner mindset, something I think I will always have to gently battle.
Looking back, my aims included:
Be more playful, focus on process, fun, enjoyment
Give yourself more quality downtime
Less screen time
More days spent reading
Write more
Less focus on outcomes
More black and white photography
Less overplanning, more simplifying, less dashing, less of trying to fit too much in
More feeling into, considering what is actually me and not writing/taking photos with a subconscious awareness of who my audience is
More Single Tasking
When I reflected halfway through last year on how I thought it had been going, I felt like it hadn’t worked and that I still felt exhausted. I had envisaged photos that I would take and they haven't materialised.
BUT…
I read more, watched TV less. I started being able to write somewhere other than at my cabin. I tried to do more things one at a time (but still managed to leave the kettle boiling away on the stove on a regular basis whilst I got distracted doing other things.)
What happened was that I did make more playful pictures, not tied to projects, that felt freer and more collaborative. These had lower expectations and I put less pressure on myself, enjoying the process and making a conscious effort not to focus on the end result.
I shot more Black and White film. I used my scary 5x4 camera and took some B&W photos on that. I developed the negatives myself in trays in the darkness of our loft and felt that old familiar delight that borders on something else, something akin to panicky anticipation , that catch in my throat and odd feeling in my tummy that I always used to get in a darkroom. And then because I so wanted to see the positive I turned one into a Cyanotype.
Freedom and play have given me pictures that I love.
So, my fallow year wasn't actually about quiet, and stillness, so much as freedom.
And whilst I do need strategies to quiet down my overactive brain, I have found that doing nothing doesn't work for me.
So it was in fact NOT a failed fallow year after all. It just didn’t meet my expectations but I have learned (and will continue to learn and re-learn over and over and over again) that sometimes I need to push my rigidity and allow things not to go to plan.
So what happens now? I like the term ‘Slow Burn’ as some kind of umbrella term for how I want to go forward, without saying that it holds for a specific length of time like the Fallow Year. Slowly, gently, things will happen and come together. There’s just a good chance that I might not know it at the time.
Sounds like a very happy year ❤️
Ooh this is a visual feast, Amanda! I so enjoyed re-reading this with my second morning cuppa, and there's much wisdom in letting go of our preconceptions about How Things Ought To Turn Out xx