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ABOUT
CONTACT
SERVICES
WOMAN
CHILDREN
ARTISTS
HEADSHOTS
BLOG

1000 WORDS

Sharing thoughts on photography, entrepreneurship, perfectionism, art, chance-taking, parenting, partnership, self-love, and, and, and…

August 2019
- Aug 28, 2019 Song of the Week // Highwomen by the HighWomen Aug 28, 2019
- Aug 8, 2019 Song of the Week // "Dolphins" in two parts Aug 8, 2019
- Aug 6, 2019 Emotional Motion Sickness Aug 6, 2019
- Aug 6, 2019 A Life with a View Aug 6, 2019
- Aug 5, 2019 COLLABORATION // A Brief Waltz in a Little Room: 23 Short Plays About Walter Eyer Aug 5, 2019
- Aug 2, 2019 Song of the Week // Crowded Table by The Highwomen Aug 2, 2019
- Aug 1, 2019 SEEN // ANDREA UPDIKE Aug 1, 2019
July 2019
- Jul 25, 2019 Twin Win Lucius Shoot Jul 25, 2019
- Jul 24, 2019 DATES & DETAILS // Late Summer & Fall Children's Portraits Jul 24, 2019
- Jul 24, 2019 Song of the Week // Cycle by Joan Shelley Jul 24, 2019
- Jul 22, 2019 PHOTOSHOOT COLLECTIVE // SNAKE SHOOT Jul 22, 2019
- Jul 19, 2019 Song of the Week // Satellite by Ben Abraham Jul 19, 2019
- Jul 18, 2019 BRAND PORTRAITURE // SAMI JO Jul 18, 2019
- Jul 17, 2019 Song of the Week // Choose Yourself by Star Slinger Jul 17, 2019
- Jul 11, 2019 THOUGHTS // Things I Want to Share 7/11/2019 Jul 11, 2019
- Jul 8, 2019 Song of the Week // Bird by Bedouine Jul 8, 2019
- Jul 6, 2019 ARTIST PORTRAITS // HAILY SOUTH Jul 6, 2019
June 2019
- Jun 29, 2019 THOUGHTS // ART AS GOD, ALWAYS Jun 29, 2019
- Jun 27, 2019 SEEN // The Seen Experience Jun 27, 2019
- Jun 26, 2019 Song of the Week // Into the Mystic by Van Morrison Jun 26, 2019
- Jun 24, 2019 SEEN // Mette Harrison Jun 24, 2019
- Jun 20, 2019 SEEN // Preparing Mind & Body for Your Photo Session Jun 20, 2019
- Jun 19, 2019 Song of the Week // Everybody's Coming to My House by David Byrne with the Detroit School of Arts Jun 19, 2019
- Jun 18, 2019 Sundance Seen // Mini Sessions - July 14th 5-8 pm Jun 18, 2019
- Jun 13, 2019 THOUGHTS // Sacred Simultaneity Jun 13, 2019
- Jun 12, 2019 Song of the Week // A Different Kind of Human by Aurora Jun 12, 2019
- Jun 10, 2019 SHARED // "From Afraid of Risk to Fearless and Free" D'Arcy's Play it Brave Podcast Jun 10, 2019
- Jun 5, 2019 SEEN // What is Seen? Jun 5, 2019
- Jun 5, 2019 Song of the Week // Human by Molly Sarlé Jun 5, 2019
- Jun 2, 2019 THOUGHTS // Sight and the Soul Jun 2, 2019
May 2019
- May 31, 2019 SURVEY SHARE // Lacey May 31, 2019
- May 29, 2019 THOUGHTS // Expansion & Boundaries May 29, 2019
- May 29, 2019 Song of the Week // Cranes in the Sky by Solange May 29, 2019
- May 27, 2019 THOUGHTS // I Know How You Feel May 27, 2019
- May 27, 2019 THOUGHTS // SOUL MATE LOVE May 27, 2019
- May 24, 2019 Featured Review // Andrea Updike May 24, 2019
- May 23, 2019 THOUGHTS // SAFE OR SELF-LOVE May 23, 2019
- May 23, 2019 THOUGHTS // Bio Before, Bio After May 23, 2019
- May 22, 2019 Song of the Week // Horizon by Aldous Harding May 22, 2019
- May 22, 2019 THOUGHTS // Collaborative Portraiture May 22, 2019
- May 21, 2019 SEEN // Maddie Beeton May 21, 2019
- May 20, 2019 THOUGHTS // Birthing a Bio May 20, 2019
- May 18, 2019 THOUGHTS // Perfectionism and Resistance May 18, 2019
- May 15, 2019 Song of the Week // Make You Better by Uni Ika Ai May 15, 2019
- May 14, 2019 SEEN // Errin Julkunen Pedersen May 14, 2019
- May 8, 2019 Song of the Week // Crystal by Stevie Nicks May 8, 2019
- May 6, 2019 BRANDING PORTRAITURE // Emily Fox King May 6, 2019
- May 1, 2019 THOUGHTS // Beaconing Humus May 1, 2019
- May 1, 2019 Song of the Week // Queendom by Aurora May 1, 2019
April 2019
- Apr 24, 2019 Song of the Week // I Know a Place by Muna Apr 24, 2019
- Apr 17, 2019 THOUGHTS // Collapse of Belief Apr 17, 2019
- Apr 17, 2019 Song of the Week // Hammond- The Roches Apr 17, 2019
- Apr 16, 2019 THOUGHTS // To the "Too Much" Woman Apr 16, 2019
- Apr 15, 2019 M O T H E R // Carol Apr 15, 2019
- Apr 14, 2019 M O T H E R // Usha Apr 14, 2019
- Apr 12, 2019 M O T H E R // Amanda Apr 12, 2019
- Apr 11, 2019 M O T H E R // Audrey Apr 11, 2019
- Apr 10, 2019 Song of the Week // Bad Girls- M.I.A. Apr 10, 2019
- Apr 10, 2019 M O T H E R // Vanessa Apr 10, 2019
- Apr 9, 2019 M O T H E R // Maddie Apr 9, 2019
- Apr 9, 2019 AIRPORTRAITS // Mo Amer Apr 9, 2019
- Apr 8, 2019 THOUGHTS // Fuck Easy Apr 8, 2019
- Apr 8, 2019 THOUGHTS // Reality of Love Apr 8, 2019
- Apr 4, 2019 BRAND PORTRAITURE // Amanda Green Pottery Apr 4, 2019
- Apr 3, 2019 Song of the Week // Cactus Tree- Joni Mitchell Apr 3, 2019
- Apr 2, 2019 BRAND PORTRAITURE // Priscilla Bingham Apr 2, 2019
- Apr 1, 2019 BRAND PORTRAITS // Dr Dee Frayne -My Yes Life Apr 1, 2019
March 2019
- Mar 28, 2019 THOUGHTS // I'll Be Damned Mar 28, 2019
- Mar 28, 2019 BRAND PORTRAITS // Angel Castillo for Ogden Mayor Mar 28, 2019
- Mar 27, 2019 Song of the Week // Feels Like a Curse- Lucius Mar 27, 2019
- Mar 21, 2019 THOUGHTS // Call and Response Mar 21, 2019
- Mar 20, 2019 BRAND PORTRAITS // Audrey Christensen - Hey Be Fab Mar 20, 2019
- Mar 19, 2019 PRODUCTION HEADSHOTS // McKenzie Steele Foster Mar 19, 2019
- Mar 14, 2019 SEEN // ERIKA EDDINGTON Mar 14, 2019
February 2019
- Feb 25, 2019 THOUGHTS // Resisting Perfectionism by Speaking Shame Feb 25, 2019
January 2019
- Jan 11, 2019 1/11/2019- Weekly Braindump and Review Jan 11, 2019
December 2018
- Dec 14, 2018 PUBLISHED // Distance of the Moon Dec 14, 2018
- Dec 14, 2018 FAMILY AT HOME // The Beatty Family Dec 14, 2018
November 2018
- Nov 13, 2018 REVIEW // Mitchener Twin Children Portraits Nov 13, 2018
- Nov 13, 2018 SEEN // Alicia Sanford Nov 13, 2018
- Nov 2, 2018 THOUGHTS // Ultraviolet Update Nov 2, 2018
- Nov 2, 2018 FAMILY AT HOME // The Sanford Family Nov 2, 2018
- Nov 2, 2018 PUBLISHED // Artist Interview, San Diego Voyager Nov 2, 2018

Song of the Week // Bad Girls- M.I.A.

April 10, 2019 in SONG OF THE WEEK

← M O T H E R // Audrey M O T H E R // Vanessa →

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ashley.thalman@gmail.com

@ashleythalmanphoto

801.319.7114

I put out a call, “seeking models for a nude project” on my story while drinking coffee with my friend Jenny. I have an ambitious shoot in the works and Jenny needs models for her figure drawing class. “Let’s see” is how so many great things get started but the truth is that I did not anticipate this kind of response. So many braves wanting to know more.

Today I canceled my afternoon work to make space for the inquiries and for the questions you sent.

If you want to know more, click the link in my bio and I will process your words and share more soon.

Today on my story I shared a bit of my experience over the last year with the work I have done to be “seen”; in clay, in the camera, in my stories, in my community, and in paint.

Everyday I am motivated by the urge to get back to the “why” of what I’m doing. Like all of us, I have many demands and interests that would likely be easier to pursue professionally. But I chose this work because of love and, because of that love, I want to do what I do well. I want to grow and be challenged as a soul, not only as a photographer or entrepreneur. If the work I do doesn’t speak to me, or challenge my ideas of life and art, then I suffer the destabilizing effects of stagnancy.

Owning @thatsultraviolet, partnering my life with @mattpetersonphotography, accepting the reality of what I am, moving to Ogden, and being more dedicated to self-love has given my the guts and drive to invest in artists as I invest in myself.

By receiving the work I seek to give, I’ve grown.

By becoming the subject/client and receiving the hospitality and gifts of artists who, like me, want to share, has inspired me to design and co-create with more empathy and connection. I feel more explorative, I feel more myself out in the unknown and artists are the perfect hosts to explore that. And, because we can’t become what we can’t see we need artists to help us imagine the unknown.

The new feminine economy of giving and receiving is symbiotic. By preserving and honoring the “why” of our work, we simultaneously create paths for the “how”. It’s real. I have been able to make portraits that I feel HOLY SHIT I CANNOT BELIEVE I’M MAKING THIS. And I really think it’s because I have, in small ways, invested in being seen. And that is the most glorious alien scary thing of all. That’s love, that’s what I’m showing up for.

Artists, would-be’s, and souls-go hire an artist! Trade with one, listen to one, be seen by one, make work for one, write a real life pen-and-paper thank you’s for someone you’re inspired by. Because it’s true that what we give, we get. It’s the truest. Amen.

I’m scared a lot of the time and I let it stop me a lot of the time, but boy howdy when I don’t. Here’s to the boy howdy times and here’s to the part of you willing to keep a big dream alive even when you’re afraid of it.

B O U N D A R I E S

1- Believe people when they show you they are.

2- Believe people when they show/tell you how they see you.

If someone says, “You’re triggering” you might be hurt or confused. You may answer, “Whoa! I was only sharing my experiences here and now you’re walking away? I’m not triggering!” But the truth is, you’ll never be a neutral to someone who sees you as a trigger. That’s the nature of what you are to them- you are triggering. Why waste time trying to convince the decided that you are anything other than what they think you are? Their perception doesn’t win, it’s just that like yours, it’s valid.

If someone perceives you as a liar you might say, “How offensive! I’m truthful, I didn’t lie!” But your truth will never be true to someone who sees you as a liar. You can’t convince someone of the truth by telling them more lies because, to them, you’re a liar and liars don’t tell the truth.

Our beliefs petrify perception and trying to change sight from the outside is a fool’s game.

Accepting a single or even majority perception of you, no matter how untrue or offensive it is, does not make the perception accurate any more than it makes your perception inaccurate; it makes you zen af. 📷: @lindseystewartphotography

This weekend we took the littles on a trip to Green River. Sonshine and I rode our kayaks and little too far away and after I pulled my kayak to shore I sat and waited. We could see Matthew and Dotter but they were far. Matthew stood and raised his arms over his head and I told Sonshine, “He will come and get us.” Sonshine was perplexed, “How do you know? Can you hear him?” Over the river roar, no, but I knew.

As we loaded the kayaks on the car Sonshine asked, “Hey, how did you know?” Matthew said, “Your mom and I work every day to share and be open and communicate and then, when things like this happen, we understand each other and we know what to do.” 📷: @madelinebeeton

Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.

Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many f*cks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a f*ck about the pain, you become unstoppable.- Mark Manson

The first time I shot Lara we drove to Tooele with a rifle and a giant balloon. She was in a perfect modern dress next to her bow tie husband with their southern seersucker children who since have grown tall.

Have we seen each other every year since, Lara?

Have we seen each other, in each other?

Have we cheered each other on in our being?

Yes.

This time it was just you and me looking at the lens through different ends, together. Just ya; no one else to dress or fret over or highlight, it was all you Lara and it was beautiful. This is Seen.

I’ve been reading a lot (really so much) Lidia Yuknavitch. She said, “You have to invent ways to be who you know you are, in the face of what’s coming at you.” We are inventions, inventing. We build soft spaces and taut borders, we process ecstasy and pain, we collect bones, we drive through deserts, we send emails and thoughtful reminders. We see, we are seen, we know what’s coming for us.

Very afraid of what he saw. Talking about it. Being brave while afraid in his Matthew’s arms. This year, unlike last, I put Matthew’s name as their stepfather because it’s the closest title to it and because damn the man even as I bless and an blessed by this one.

Didn’t stop talking today. Not once.

R E A C T I O N

September 2016

I took this photograph a few days after Jim’s airplane crashed. I drove to Reno to photograph it because I didn’t know what else to do. In the silence of i-80 I knew that death’s depths were coming for me.

Days later I traveled to Seattle to celebrate my friend’s wedding, to photograph it. When the celebrations ended my friend Jeff who, after years of patience asked, “What’s going on with your marriage?” We both cried. I told it true, for the first time. No hopeful lies or excuses.

In mid month, Meikel gave birth to Mara and life burst through as I photographed it. A summer storm ripped through the sky of me. I was electric and alone in what I had to do.

The month ended with Maddie and Mandy at @amothersnature. We retreated to the mountains to make space for the grief of women whose children never came home. I was useless, acting a rote role while I tried to find a way and the words for my own splintered life.

To become a woman I never wanted to be was a work I put off, and put off, and put off until it broke me. To break a family. To acknowledge brokenness, to burn, to say the truest thing. To destroy the veneer. To burn lies to the ground, to die. To call it. To say it. To say it with fire. To sit with lady death. To risk being just like my mess of a mother, my sisters, my father. To forgive, to heal, to be seen. To know failure. To divorce. To fail, to die, to be ripped and ruined. I had to, I had to.

I told Errin and we shook. We knew I was dying as I mourned the Ashley I could no longer bare being. Errin wore hope on her face, on her mouth, and on her eyes she held my grief. She and Jeff wore the same protective, determined rage and excitement that I could not yet hold for myself. Soon I let others hold me too.

To become a woman I never wanted to become was to become the woman I always knew I was. To break a family was to build one. To say the truest thing was to create. To destroy the veneer was to discover alchemy.

To fail, to die, to be ripped and ruined is to know that to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Happy Anniversary Ashley. It’s almost been 3 years. Carry on, you have to, you get to.

To be pushed from the tribe for being yourself is an anticipated pain that keeps us closeted for entire and precious lifetimes. There is pain on other side of realizing our fears but then we remember that fear of the thing, is greater than the thing itself.

In the telling of my own truth I’ve found that the love and empathy I’ve wanted from the people closest to me comes to me, from me. From knowing that no one can love me like I can. Meeting that truth is the work of self-love and it is a liberation unto itself.

Sometimes experiencing, growing through, and surviving, the very conditions of the rejection that we feared, can set us free. Free to grow up, free to experience life outside of fearful belongings and abusive systems or families.

And sometimes when we show ourselves our tribe loves us when we expected them not to. And sometimes they learn to.

Do I have people in my circles who fear that my love is conditional upon their success, adherence to law, faith system, politics, economic class, negotiations of being, sexual orientation, etc. How much of their fear do I generate by my silence?

As a mother I try my best to talk about all of life's possibilities for, and with, my children and yet I know I neglect many of them. This is the reality of raising the children of tomorrow.

When I was a kid no one talked about leaving the church. No one talked about being trans or non-gender binary. We didn't have the language in my world not because it didn't exist but rather because it was kept quiet, hidden and festering.

Life is diverse, as are the ways to live it. I don't want my children, or you for that matter, to find that their fear of my rejection, was unfounded, I want the people in my circle to know that my love is bedrock, though sometimes tested, is without lasting condition. I want them to feel my love as an expansive, steady thing.

I don't want the people I love most to worry with anticipation that their foibles or truths will ruffle me and then be shocked when they don't rather, I want them to know that it's hard to shake or shock me because I know that life isn't what we, or anyone else, says "goes". 📷 @mattpetersonphotography

To forgive the debt between what you are, and what you think you’re supposed to be is liberation.

In Seen I‘ve found my work’s exhaustive metaphor. Seen pushes me. It pushes my clients, it pushes my business, my time, my self-concept. It initiates and recognizes story and meaning within my work as a photographer and in my life as a woman. Seen is a form, a shape, and a source.

This portrait is of Haley, who was photographed last month as part of my first ever Sundance Seen sessions.

Below is a portion of Haley’s answer (shared with her permission) to the question, “I want to document my life at this time because:”
_____________________________________________________
::Djuna Barnes once wrote that “a man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.” I think I am so drawn to documenting this moment—and working with someone else, an artist's eye, to document my life outside of my own writings—because of this shadowy year I'm experiencing. It's almost like, to see it through a camera's lens, will be to see it for the first time outside myself:: Thank you, Haley. To see a few more images from our session and some of Haley’s thoughts, see my story.

What, if not seen?

@hailysouth made this photo of me just after I made photos of her and I love its disheveled happy vibe.

We exist in an exciting phrase of the human story. With increasing momentum, artists are working to both confront and tell the complicated histories of being human, of being contained in sinewy form. Being seen is work, seeing is work, holy is the work to re-write, heal, hold, and declare that these bodies are ours. Thank you for telling such a needed story @joel.church