"I keep photographing the house because it keeps happening to me.

Even after all these years, even after knowing all its angles like I know the curve of my own thoughts, it changes, and so do I. Maybe that’s what photography is — an agreement between what is there and what is breaking inside us. The light hits the hallway wall in a certain way one morning, but really, it’s a memory pressing its forehead to mine.

These rooms have held us through everything: the quiet, the noise, the fights that echo long after words have stopped. I used to think the house was background, now I know it’s witness: the floor remembers, the window listens. When we fight, the house takes the blow. When we make up, it holds us, quiet and unflinching. I didn’t know the walls could be this patient and I didn’t know I’d need them to be.

There’s less urgency now. I don’t reach as hard, my camera rests easier in my hands. I wait more, I listen, I follow the light as it bends across a face, a wall, a glass of water left half-drunk on the counter. What I once framed with a sense of grasping, I now approach like a confession. The house hasn’t stopped changing and neither have I, and each photograph is a way of staying close, trying to be honest. Even when things are complicated, or nothing is happening, I still reach for the camera. Not out of habit, but out of a kind of trust that there’s always something worth seeing."

Iris HummJournal - Summer