Last week, I flew to Latvia to spend Easter with my partner at her grandparents’ rural home, located east of Rīga. There’s always an instant sense of peace once you arrive, and time seems to slow down to the point where you’re no longer checking the clock.
It felt good to slow down and do a bit of personal work after a busy March and April in the commercial world. Over the summer, I’ll be taking a sabbatical to spend just under three months in Latvia, working on a project I’m very excited to begin. I’ll be exploring the nation’s relationship with paganism, including traditional ceremonies as well as more modern or neo-pagan expressions in daily life.
The following images serve, somewhat, as a starting point for the project. Although it’s unlikely they’ll be included in the final body of work, I couldn’t help but have the project in the back of my mind—making conscious, and sometimes unconscious, decisions about what I was photographing. They also gave me a sense of the feeling I want to achieve in the work: peaceful, evocative, warm, and tender.
Enjoy!
