A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words…

When I was 23 years old, I moved from Massachusetts to LA. In doing so, I left behind pretty much life as I knew it: friends, family, and everything familiar. And while quite a few years have passed since then, and I’ve found new friends, family, and discovered a whole world, I still hold my past close to my heart.

One of the hardest parts about being 3000 miles away from those that I grew up with, my family in particular, is the day to day. I don’t think I realized how much you share with the people you live with and love by just, simply, living with them. And while phone calls and emails are great and help us all stay in touch, there’s nothing like the visits that are all too few. And in the meantime, one of the ways I’ve found to bridge that gap, surprise, surprise, is through pictures.

When I got my first apartment out here, one of the first things I did was take pictures and send them to my family. When I bought my car, I took pictures and sent them to my family. Since I always tended to have a camera on me, it wasn’t much of an issue. But then I had been living in LA for a bit and things started seeming, well, normal. And the camera came out less and less. Let’s be honest, that was probably a good thing.

I still like to share. Its a rare occasion when I don’t compile all my pictures in a SmugMug album and send out links to my family. There isn’t a holiday or a vacation that goes by where I don’t try to capture a little bit of my world to send back home to my Mom and Dad.

It’s the little things like this that make the distance seem not too far and to keep, even just a bit, of us involved with the others’ lives. There is something vivid in the visual, it can transport you, it fills in all the blurry areas from a phone call, the parts that are just indescribable in an email. It lets me share my experiences as I experienced them; you can see what I saw and how I saw it. And I think we can all attest to the fact: there is nothing like seeing the face of a friend, a loved one, to know.