Rachael Sammon Blog ♡

cringe

So here's a real heavy post to ease us into the working week, eh! It might be a long one so if you want to grab yourself a cup of tea, now is the time to do it!

Alright? Are you settled? Comfy? Let's go! ♡

I have a deep-seated need to create; to photograph a moment, to make worlds exist, to tell stories. But I guess that's not really the *why*, is it?

I have an obsession with beauty. Yes that sounds shallow, and conceited, and probably suggestive of a need for personal reflection and therapy, but I promise it's not as literal as it sounds! Hear me out.

(Side note: if you remember me mentioning this briefly in my 'exploring inspiration' post then I guess today is the day we delve further in!)

I create because I want you to feel the beauty I see.

And please don't think I use the word beauty to suggest physically perfect people in a physically perfect existence because 'physically perfect' doesn't exist, and how dull would the world be if it did?

What I mean is that I create, for example, to show you the beauty I see in the vast painterly skies when I'm out of the city. I create to show you the opportunities for magic I see in the everyday. And yes, sometimes I create to show you the beauty of a moment, of a fleeting moment in time, even if it's entirely fictional.

I shot this image as part of an editorial for a stylist a couple of years ago now, and it's still one of my absolute favourites. Yes, it depicts two stunning models in well picked clothes but that's not why I find it beautiful. I find it beautiful because it depicts this moment between two completely fictional people; a softness, a romance, an emotion.

To me it doesn't show the reality. I don't see two professional models who only met on set that day, lying on the damp (and definitely not crisp) old autumn leaves in the freezing cold, at the end of a shoot as we were losing the light, with me precariously balanced on a ladder over the top of them beside a car park off the busy road. It instead shows the beauty of a moment created, a fictional world, inhabited by fictional people.

And I know when I bandy around the word 'beauty', it's all entirely subjective. What I find beautiful, others may not, and vice versa. When I read F. Scott Fitzgerald's opening line of 'The Offshore Pirate', I marvel at what I consider to be the beauty of the scene he sets:

'This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes.'
(link)

Yet other people, I have no doubt, find it needlessly wordy and ostentatious.

I also have no doubt that some people don't like what I do and that's a-okay too. We all find beauty in different things.

I create because I want you to feel the beauty I see.

Why do you create? I'd love to hear all about it!

With love,
Rachael ♡