Personal | 2021 in Review: a year of adventure, adversary, and letting go

I’ve been trying for weeks now how to summarize this year with words, and I’ve been coming up short every time. This year was both incredible and incredibly strange, even in comparison to the disconcerting year preceding it. I amassed an astonishingly large portfolio both personally and professionally. I visited sixteen states, countless national parks and historic sites, and shot nine destination events along the way. (All remote locations have been noted in the captions.) 2021 was definitely a year for the books, and a much needed change from the stasis of 2020.

No year is without it’s struggles. I got massively behind on editing due to delayed bookings from 2020 intermixed with new ones. I caught Covid in July and lost a week, and with my workload I was never able to regain it. I’ve been consistently a week behind ever since. In the mix, personal emergencies and failings took a toll on me behind the scenes finally leading my husband and I to the conclusion that something had to change. In 2022 I plan to let go of some of my less profitable projects (not weddings or photography, of course!) to make room for more time to focus on our family and my mental health, and he strengthened his career more so. He starts a new remote position in LA the first week of January. We plan to eventually move to the LA area in the next couple of years. So, alls well that ends well, I guess.

Every year I make this review post and every year I’m left with a growing bittersweet taste in my mouth. I’m bothered by it because all things considered this was an amazing year for me, filled with travel and love and creativity. Yet, I’m always adverse to my own successes, ever challenging myself to do better and be better. It feels as though there’s an ever growing underlayer of darkness to life that maybe I didn’t notice before or maybe I could just ignore it more so a few years back. Taking an image to me feels different now. Seeing and experiencing new things feels rarer and more important.

Last night I couldn’t sleep at all, and I found myself rifling through readings from a class I’d taken my freshman year of college. In a manifesto by Charles Bernstein, a quoted excerpt from an Akilah Oliver poem struck a chord with me. Oliver wrote, “Poetry is a holding space, a folded grace, in which objects held most dear disappear returning as radiant moments of memory’s forgiving home.” Maybe that’s why this year’s end feels so bittersweet because I had so much time to create said poetry. The making of the image is just as important as the image itself, but my mind will falter and I will look back to cherish those experiences through perfectly composed windows. I think that’s beautiful somehow; I think that’s why photography is important. Photography shows us exactly what we need to see.

I cannot begin to list the clients, vendors, friends, family, and acquaintances that made taking these images possible. I am truly grateful for each and every one of you. Happy New Year!
- Juliana