Rinko Kawauchi
Hi fam,
Little announcement! The Easter sale — four offerings at the deepest discounts I've ever made available — is open until Monday April 13 at midnight. A few extra days because you asked for them (you know who you are). All the details at laurabeltranvillamizar.me. And if you're not sure which one fits — just reply to this email and we'll figure it out together.
Now on to the newsletter:
Nothing is a coincidence. Everything is in its right place, yet, I believe that everything is random. What happens in that randomness is that patterns emerge, like chaotic patterns. That’s magical pattern-making if you ask me. They show up where attention accumulates. Where something keeps being drawn back to the same place, the same light, the same question, without a plan.
I mean genuinely everything works this way: The seasons shifting in your body waayyy before anything outside confirms it. The color you reach for in every city you’ve ever shot in, without consciously deciding to. The quality of light you keep chasing but cannot fully explain, the way you edit your images, the shapes, colors or the themes that keep coming back. Random choices, repeated enough, stop being looking and feeling random at all once you start paying attention, being intentional.
Your photography has been making a pattern this whole time. The question is: have you been paying attention to its patterns?
I know this because I've watched it in my own work. Photography as a medium has moved and shifted under me over the years, the way I use it, what I ask of it, what it asks of me. And yet. There are certain things that remain. A quality of stillness inside motion. A certain relationship to the edge of the frame. The feeling I'm always after, even when the subject, location, camera change completely. That's the thing that doesn't move. That's the signature underneath everything. The pattern I didn't plan but kept making anyway. <3
And once I could see it (really, really see it) I stopped having to explain myself so much. The work already knew what it was doing. I just had to embody its message. Allow the story to be told through me.
Rinko Kawauchi was deep into a body of work before she consciously understood what the work was actually about. Circles kept arriving, the moon, a soap bubble, a bonfire seen from above. Her seeing kept organizing itself around that shape the way a river keeps finding the same path through rock. She didn't decide it. It decided itself, through her, over time. ❤
Saul Leiter spent decades inside the same few blocks of New York and red kept arriving. An umbrella. A coat disappearing around a corner. A shop window in winter. Red as thread, as punctuation, as the thing that made the whole frame exhale.
Zanele Muholi. The direct gaze, every portrait, every subject looking back. A philosophy made visible before it was ever articulated. A recurring insistence that to be seen is to be present, to be counted, to exist on your own terms.
None of them explained their work at the beginning. The work had learned to speak for itself.
So how does one get there? to a place where your work speaks for itself and you are a conduit of it?
Well:
Your visual language is what your work is doing while you think you're just making pictures. It lives underneath the projects, across the years, across the continents, regardless of subject matter.
Something keeps coming back.
Something keeps insisting on itself.
And when you finally stop long enough to hear it — really hear it — something in you settles. Like you've been introduced to yourself.
You don't build a visual language. You learn to read the one you've already been making.
And here's where it connects to timing. To Bayo's response-ability. To everything.
The photographer who knows their visual language knows who they are.
And the photographer who knows who they are is the one who can respond when the moment arrives. When an editor calls. When a grant opens. When a commission lands. There's no scrambling. The portfolio speaks before they do. The work is already legible.
Visibility isn't just about being seen. It's about being legible. And legibility (the real kind, the kind that opens doors) comes from pattern.
I've sat in enough juries to watch this play out over and over. NYT. World Press Photo. Alexia Foundation. Vogue. The photographers who move through those rooms with ease are rarely the most technically gifted people in the pile. They're the ones who have done this work. Who know what they're making and why. Who have followed their pattern far enough that the work has developed its own gravity.
This is also what editing actually is, I think. People come to it like they're judging a competition, what's strong enough, what will land, what do I dare include. But editing from that place just produces anxiety in image form. The real edit is an act of listening.
What is this body of work trying to say? Where is the thread? What keeps coming back?
When you find it, the artist statement stops sounding like someone else wrote it. The second-guessing quiets. Sigh.
A practice, if you want it:
Pull twenty images from the last year. Not your favorites. Not the most liked. Twenty that feel like yours. Print them if you can, this doesn't work the same way on a screen, I promise.
Then just look. Let your body respond before your brain starts analyzing.
What keeps coming back? What color, what light, what relationship between subject and space? What question are you asking over and over, in different rooms, in different countries, with different people?
That's your pattern. That's where your work has been trying to take you.
All you have to do is follow it.
With love, Lola
p.s. The Easter sale — four offerings at the deepest discounts I've ever made available — is open until Monday April 13 at midnight. A few extra days because you asked for them (you know who you are). All the details at laurabeltranvillamizar.me. And if you're not sure which one fits — just reply to this email and we'll figure it out together.