Two Weeks In Italy

There's a particular kind of jet lag that has nothing to do with time zones. You land back in your own house, same walls, same light coming through the same windows and for a few days, none of it looks quite the way it used to.

I got back from two weeks in Italy and walked into my kitchen expecting familiar. Instead I caught the afternoon sun hitting the counter in a way I swear I'd never noticed, even though I've stood in that exact spot a thousand times. The texture of the sidewalk out front. The particular gray of my own front door. Things I've walked past so often they'd become invisible to me.

Travel does that. It doesn't just show you somewhere new, it briefly recalibrates how you look at somewhere old. For a few days, your own life gets treated like a place you're visiting for the first time, and everything in it gets a second look it usually doesn't earn.

As a photographer, this is the part of the trip I actually try to protect. Not the photos I took in Italy, the way I'm looking now that I'm home.

Because here's the thing about seeing for a living: the eye gets lazy in familiar spaces. You stop noticing your own kitchen light for the same reason you stop noticing the sound of your own refrigerator, repetition trains you to tune it out. It's an occupational hazard. The muscle that notices beautiful, ordinary light is the same muscle I need switched on for every session, and it's the first thing that goes soft when I'm not actively using it.

So when I come home from somewhere that forced me to really look at light, at color, at the small human details of a place, I try to hold onto that state as long as I possibly can before the routine swallows it back up. I'll walk through my own house on purpose. Notice the light at 4pm instead of assuming I already know what it looks like. Treat my own street like I'm scouting it for a shoot.

It fades. It always fades. Within a week or two, the kitchen goes back to being just the kitchen. But for a little while, I get to borrow the eyes of someone seeing my life for the first time and that's a genuinely useful thing to have access to, both as a person and as a photographer.

(insert images from Italy)