Welcome back to Light Leaked! We hope your summer was productive and inspiring! Ours certainly was. We’re excited to be back and even more excited to be sharing with you this special conversation between acclaimed photographers
Lori Vrba and
Eliot Dudik. The two artists chat about Lori’s new monograph
The Moth Wing Diaries, family, art making, and inspiration VIA text messages.
This post also marks three years of Light Leaked—that’s three years of community engagement, growth and the opportunity to showcase amazing photography. We are so pleased that you have continued to support Light Leaked.
This year, we are offering a special give-away courtesy of our featured interviewer Lori Vrba. We will be giving away a copy of Lori’s monograph, The Moth Wing Diaries. The monograph’s elegant design and stunning print quality makes The Moth Wing Diaries a must have addition to any photographic book collection!
You can enter this giveaway by sharing this post on social media and/or by leaving a comment (on this post OR the original Facebook post). The giveaway will run Monday August 17 - Sunday August 23. A winner will be selected at random and announced on Monday August 24.
"I grew up in a little house on a dead end dirt road with no street sign, buried deep in the tall pines of Southeast Texas. I was a scrappy, out-the-door little girl with wild, uncombed hair, entertaining myself most days by stick-drawing in the dirt or playing house in the woods. I spent more time alone than not and don't remember wishing for company.
Mom had a chest-of-drawers in the front hall. On the occasions I found myself sick and tired of the oppressive heat and humidity, I would plop down on the cool linoleum floor and pull out the bottom drawer on the left side and stay for a long, long time. This drawer is where she kept the photographs. There were decades worth of family history in that drawer but I knew none of it. My parents left behind hard lives. They never talked about it, and I didn't grow up knowing extended family. So the photographs were just photographs; intriguing, anonymous faces, mostly in black and white, whispering stories from a piece of time that mattered to Someone. Someone pressed the shutter. Someone made choices about light and composition. Someone had a story worth telling. I sat alone, mesmerized, with the pictures piled up all around me on the floor, in what I now know to be the very beginning of my passionate love affair with photography.
My life experiences have brought me to this place where I find myself overwhelmed with the drive to make photographs about who I am: what I feel inside, what I believe to be sacred and enduring. I am inspired by moments that hold contradictions…like a big lightening storm that is really uncomfortable and really beautiful at exactly the same time. Such duality is true for the very best things in life. Loving someone is uncomfortable and beautiful. Having children is uncomfortable and beautiful. Being an artist is uncomfortable and beautiful. I kept a journal for most of my youth and this work is very much the same. It is a visual diary of my grown up, conflicted, complicated, rich, womanly, mother-nature-loving life. And maybe someday if my children's children find the drawer full of my photographs…they will spread them out and sit criss-cross-applesauce in the middle of it all and they will know me…as if I were right there with them."
Take a look at a selection of images from the book and continue downward to read the text message interchange between Lori and Eliot:
