Feeling Rather Eggy Today

A quiet moment when the water bubbles gently cradle the egg. That transformative moment before opacity- delicate and disarming.

Wayfare Magazine includes my photos from Rome in their first printed edition to be sold at Anthropologie.

I am excited to see some of my photos from my trip to Rome in the first printed issue of Wayfare Magazine. When I mentioned to a friend and colleague Peggy Wong that I was taking a trip to Rome, she told me that she wanted to see my photos when I returned, and that she may want to include them in the first printed edition of Wayfare Magazine (a cool new travel mag that turns that category a bit on it's head.)

What was nice about this request was that it wasn't really an assignment. She wanted to see the photos that I would take for myself, she was especially interested in seeing what I shot for my personal series of work entitled "Bodies of Land" which is comprised of out of focus landscapes, or in this case cityscape's.

I also played a lot with Instagram for this trip since I liked the format, the accessibility to capture things at any time and the tones that were rendered with some of the filters. I am usually not a big "effects" photographer, nor do I like a lot of retouching. I liken the filters to using different types of film or printer paper.

Here is the text that accompanies the images in the magazine:

Photographer Leigh Beisch, along with her husband, father, and ten-year-old

daughter, forgo their annual trip to Cape Cod for something a little more mysterious. Here we get a light-filled glimpse into the beauty of a region teeming with old world intrigue.

We decided to rent a small apartment in Trastevere, located on the outskirts of Rome and just south of Vatican City. We booked the apartment for two weeks so we could spend one week as tourists and the next week as locals. While Rome is where scale and extraordinary monuments are on display at every turn, the color and texture of this neighborhood are what captured our hearts. Here we felt like we could experience art, not just see it. The building of our tiny rented apartment had the most amazing rustic front door that was designed to keep out invaders during the medieval period. There was also a stone staircase that was so worn with age that I could imagine a young slave girl carrying water up them thousands of years ago. Staying here instead of a hotel allowed us to let the language of the place—the people, the light, the smells—to seep in and shape our experience. The family and I enjoyed being part of the neighborhood’s everyday routines, sampling from the well-visited osterias and trattorias; shopping at the local designer clothing boutiques; and enjoying the famous Sunday flea market, Porta Portese. One place we frequented was local trattoria La Scala, where my daughter would order her favorite dish of spaghetti con burro e parmigiano, a simple dish of pasta with butter and parmigiano. One of my favorite dishes here was the tagliolini cacio e pepe con fioridi zucca e pachino, a pasta with a beautiful squash blossom layered on top, then sprinkled with parmesan and ground pepper.

SEE. I spent some time shooting for my personal work

entitled “Bodies of Land,” which is a series of abstract

landscapes that are out of focus with the subject matter

being light and color. This allows me to create a more

timeless landscape that captures the imagination.

EAT. My father and I woke up early a few mornings

to photograph. Before we headed out, we stopped

at the local Bar for morning cappuccinos and jam

filled pastries. I loved the colorful trays here

Our first morning in Rome, we headed to the Piazza di Santa Maria, where we found a beautiful fountain guarding the entrance to the Basilica of Our Lady, or Basilica di Santa Maria, one of the most ancient churches in Rome. So ancient, in fact, that it’s one of the few churches where you can see Christ depicted as a living prophet, rather than on the cross. It was here that I noticed the light streaming in through the clerestory, illuminating select statues and giving the sense of divine light. This light shaped my experience in Rome, becoming my subject matter and focal point of the trip. The photo of the portal looking out onto the wall with a row of dotted trees was at the entrance to Hadrian’s Villa, a Roman Emperor of the 2nd century AD. The wall pictured here was built to be just one mile long, which was the length of the palace and, according to our guide, the distance that the Emperor’s physician had advised him to walk every day. The morning light of this photo gives us a glimpse into what one of the Emperor’s walks might have been like. From the cobblestone streets and terracotta and maize buildings cast in deep wine hues to street windows dotted with laundry lines, Rome was richer than I had ever imagined. I loved the color of the place, and the way the light would fill ancient crevices to reveal some things and hide others. It felt as though this light held the secrets of Rome.

The Most Meaningful Photo of My Life was Shot with an iphone

The Most Meaningful photo of my life was shot with an iphone.

I have owned various cameras for over the years, starting in middle school with the Kodak Instamatic, then graduating to a Nikon F2 when entering the photography program at RISD and now an arsenal of various format cameras both film and digital to meet the needs of my professional assignments. For the past couple of years however, I have found myself intrigued with iphonography (to give it an official sounding name) ever since I captured one of the most meaningful shots of my life with my phone! 

Back in 2009, a few months before my mother passed away, I captured a photo of her and my daughter walking back from Church. I wouldn’t have thought to carry my camera to church, and honestly at that stage of her illness she was not all that open to having her photo taken – due to the wig and all. I happened to be walking in front of them on that rainy Sunday in Mill Valley, CA and turned around and saw them together- walking and chatting. I grabbed my phone and snapped the photo without them even knowing I was taking the photo. That photo later became an important one to many members of her family and friends because it truly captured her spirit, her strength, her beauty and her incredible connection that she had with my daughter. I was able to capture that brief moment unnoticed because of the camera phone. It is a camera that is not perceived as one so people act differently around it, they seem more relaxed, more like their true selves- not their “camera ready"self.

Up until then I didn’t think too much of taking photos with my phone, now I use it for personal snapshots, personal projects and most recently for an editorial project. I find the “phone” to be an incredibly immediate connection to capturing the moment, the feeling, and the energy of the scene without all the technical maneuvering that sometimes needs to occur with more complex cameras. For me it is like painting, a direct, immediate and satisfying way of making art. And I love that it puts the power to make great photos in the hands of everyone!

The power of capturing the world so effortlessly has in turn captured our attention. It has shifted how we communicate. We connect through images shared. Images of the real world, of real, raw moments that are most times unedited and un art directed. And yes, there are a lot of not so great images out there, but the power to create is infectious and with time the images get better and sometimes develop huge followings. Now they reserve seats at the US Open not just for the top sports photographers but also for the top instagrammers- ones who have hundreds and thousands of followers! 

When they called this the information age they had no idea how right they were. We have become impassioned with communicating with each other,  in bursts of words on twitter/facebook/texts and now bursts of color, light and pixels in the form of instagram/iphonography.

Also check out my instagram on http://instagrid.me/leighbeisch/

if you do make sure to scroll down to see some of my photos of Rome from a recent trip.  More to come on that!