Brick and Mortar “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”’ -Sylvia Plath

Streets of D.C.

USA | Wednesday, November 12, 2014 | 5 photos

Living across the country from my grandparents, I never felt that I knew my grandfather very well before he died. So when I took my first photography class and my grandma gave me his old SLR cameras, it was both an opportunity for me to be that much closer to my grandfather, and the start of my love for photography.

I never liked art very much; it was too imprecise, too subjective to the viewer. In photography, I found a medium as analytical as myself. It allowed me to frame and discover images I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed. Rather than simply capture how a place looks, a good photograph captures how a place feels.

Photography, along with language, culture, and journalism, is one of the reasons I want to travel as much as possible in college. Through travel, I hope to gain an understanding of life across a complex and infinitely varied globe, and through journalism, to communicate those lives and experiences to others. But while words can communicate remarkable information and experience, only photographs can capture the humanity and feeling of a place. With photographs, we can be inspired to look again – and perhaps see the extraordinary where we might never have guessed it to be.