gut first, understand later

 I trust my gut completely.

She has never needed logic or evidence - just a quiet knowing. She tells me when something is right, and when something is wrong. When to lean in and when to run. When to listen. When to let go. And, just as certainly, she tells me when I have to take a photograph.

I think I've always made images instinctively, following an internal pull rather than a structured plan. Outside the confines of any defined project I may be working on, I hunt and gather - collecting images over long stretches of time without fully knowing why I’m doing it. These photographs sit patiently in the background, in various folders, on hard drives, waiting. And only later - sometimes years later - might I return to them and begin to understand what they were trying to tell me.

I have done this before, in fieldnotes, where I referred to these collected images as just that - photographic fieldnotes. They were evidence of an instinct, of something felt rather than consciously understood. They were linked to the anxious feeling in my gut, a raw, restless need to document something before it disappeared. I’ve been thinking a lot about those images recently, about the ones I have gathered since, and about what they could reveal when seen together.

And because of everything I have been interested in and thinking about lately, I have to wonder - how does instinct relate to déjà vu? Because déjà vu, too, is a feeling. It is not something we think - it is something that overtakes us. A sensation inexplainable, only experienced. It makes me wonder if, when I feel compelled to take a photograph, it’s because I have already seen it before - perhaps in a dream, in a forgotten memory, in some echo of a life I don’t fully recall. Perhaps these images are part of something larger, and my gut knows it before I do.

But here is where I feel frustrated: I know these images mean something. I feel it. But putting words around them is difficult (she says as she writes yet another post vaguely about the same thing yet again). And I know, for them to become anything at all, they need words. I wrote about this in a previous post, about how language shapes understanding, about how even the most instinctive, feeling-led work needs articulation to carry it forward. Without words, do these images remain just fragments? Is instinct alone enough? I worry that if I cannot explain them, they will stay in an in-between, suspended between meaning and nothingness. And yet, how do you write about something so abstract, so unknown? How do you put language to something that was never born from words in the first place? Part of me resists this, wants to believe that feeling is enough - that if I was compelled to make the image, that should be reason enough for its existence. But I also know that to move forward, I have to find a way in. And right now, I don’t know what that way is.

  

And then, there are these images. I look at them, and I feel that - not quite recognition, but a pull, as though they are trying to tell me something I can’t yet decipher. They exist in a hazy, in-between space, where light and shadow blur into something both familiar and foreign. Are they reflections? Are they distortions? Are they remnants of something I have seen before but can’t quite place?

Perhaps this is what instinct looks like when made visible. A moment frozen, but not yet understood. I collect images like these because I feel compelled to, because my gut tells me to, because they hold a significance I can’t explain. They sit in that same uncertain space as déjà vu - real and unreal at once. I wonder if, when I take these photographs, I am attempting to grasp at something fleeting, ephemeral, trying to bring into focus what is just out of reach.

I think what comes next is exactly this - looking closer. Not just at the images, but at how they interact, how they speak to each other. It’s about allowing them to form their own language, to see what narratives emerge when they are placed side by side. That is my next step. I must keep creating, sift through these images, and sit with them, examine that which has been gathered over time, to see what patterns emerge. I need to trust my gut.