The Journal

Every photograph leaves a question behind.

Essays by Zoë about family photographs, Black history, childhood and the strange little details that become a life.

Each story begins with an image and follows the thought somewhere less expected.

Colourful Frequency of Love commissioned portrait of two sisters wearing bold patterned clothing.

Ways of Seeing · 12 minute read

For the Relationships Nobody Gives a Ceremony

Some of the most important relationships in our lives receive no formal recognition at all. No vows. No speeches. No anniversary everyone remembers. And yet they shape entire lives. Perhaps portraiture can do something ceremonies usually do: stop time long enough to say, this mattered.

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Frequency of Love collage based on Russell Lee's 1939 photograph of formerly enslaved Willis Winn holding a horn used to call enslaved people near Marshall, Texas.

Ways of Seeing · 11 minute read

When the Horn Went Quiet

A horn is only a hollow object until a system teaches people that they must answer it. In a 1939 photograph, formerly enslaved Willis Winn holds a horn once used to call enslaved people. What interests me isn't only what the object once did. It is the extraordinary fact that, by the time the camera arrived, it could no longer make him obey.

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Frequency of Love digital collage showing a Black girl in a bold patterned dress holding a pale-skinned boy doll against a monochrome background.

Ways of Seeing · 13 minute read

The First Person You Ever Looked After May Not Have Been Real

Children spend an astonishing amount of time caring for people who do not exist. They feed dolls that are not hungry, comfort toys that cannot cry and tuck imaginary lives into bed. Perhaps play is not an escape from reality at all. Perhaps it is one of the first places we practise becoming ourselves.

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Four more ways in

Choose the thought you cannot leave alone.

There is no correct place to begin. Follow the title, the face or the question that makes you pause.

Colourful Frequency of Love commissioned family portrait created from a real family photograph using bold pattern and digital collage.

Ways of Seeing · 12 minute read

You Are Somebody’s Ancestor in Progress

We tend to imagine ancestors in old photographs. But every ancestor was once simply somebody standing in the present, worrying about ordinary things and having no idea which photograph might one day become precious.

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Frequency of Love digital collage showing a boy standing on stacked crates with a megaphone, wearing colourful patterned clothing against a black-and-white street scene.

Ways of Seeing · 15 minute read

Before Somebody Tells You to Be Smaller

Nobody is born worrying that they are a bit much. That tends to arrive later — after enough rooms, enough rules and enough tiny corrections teach us where we are expected to stand. Perhaps confidence is not something we need to manufacture. Perhaps some of it is something we are trying to recover.

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Colourful Frequency of Love commissioned portrait of a mother with her two children, incorporating bold patterned clothing and an orange backdrop.

Ways of Seeing · 10 minute read

The Versions of Us Our Children Keep

There is a woman your children remember who no longer exists. She has your face, wore your clothes and answered to your name. But she belongs to a particular year of their childhood — and by the time they are old enough to tell you who she was, you will have become somebody else.

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Frequency of Love digital collage showing three boys from behind, wearing colourful patterned clothing and looking down a black-and-white city street.

Ways of Seeing · 8 minute read

The Future Is Usually Photographed From Behind

We are strangely obsessed with faces. We think a portrait should show us who somebody is. But sometimes the more interesting question is not who they are at all. It is where they are going.

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Sunday Best displayed as a large framed artwork in a warm contemporary interior.

Continue through the art

Spend time with the works behind the stories.

The Journal offers the context. The Work lets you stay with the finished artwork, its colour and all the details that invited the story in the first place.

The Studio Letter

The next story can come to you.

Occasional writing from Zoë on memory, colour, photographs and the pieces taking shape in the studio.