I took up photography at the age of 9, when I first got my hands on a Brownie—one of those old Kodak box cameras. The first photograph I took was a picture of my mom in our garden in Syracuse, New York. I still have it. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had fallen in love with a new visual language, which quietly took root in my psyche and grew, offering me a lifelong refuge and an avenue for expressing otherwise inchoate emotions.
I have always felt an affinity for visual narratives rooted in the wee hours, in solitude, in wintry, mediated light from artificial sources. Bearing witness to the liminal quality of early morning light through my camera provides a visual counterpoint to the ever-increasing amount of worldly darkness and the concurrent shadows that fall across my troubled soul.
My temperament makes me both a runner and dog walker, often out before dawn, regardless of the time or the weather, when I have the world to myself. In this solitude, I wander through the industrial landscape, the detritus of capitalism that surrounds us at all times. Given the absence of light from the sky, my eyes are drawn to man-made light sources: in lambent shadows, the landscape is alive and commanding and full of uncanny details. Sometimes in winter, the cold is so deep, it seeps into the very bones of everything I see—a beauty that both surprises and quiets me. It’s both experience and memory, the kind of silence I remember when I swim under water.
In school, I studied photography and film, and when I had to make a decision between the still image or the moving image, I chose the still. What I refer to as “the stayed moment.” A moment in time is technically what still photography is—and again, the recorded accumulation of these moments has been necessary food for my soul. It is the everydayness I love and respond to. The absence of chaos, of noise—it simply is.
Holly Haywood is the senior adjunct professor of photography in the Department of Creative and Fine Arts at the University of New England, in Portland, Maine. She earned her B.F.A. in photojournalism and film at the Rochester Institute of Technology. After graduation, Holly spent years doing darkroom work at Colorado State University before moving back east. Her first exhibition was in 1982 at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and since then her work has been shown in galleries across the country, including the International Photography Congress at the Maine Photographic Workshop (1989) and the Soho Photo Gallery in New York (2005, 2007). She has co-owned a photography business and worked in multi-media. Despite the ghastly state of the world and of the arts, her passion for photography remains miraculously unabated.
