365 days in
It takes time to find the right room
Yesterday evening, walking back from a graduation shoot in Oxford, camera bag over one shoulder, tripod over the other, feet aching, heart full, I passed Café Coco.
We used to sit in there in 1999. Late uni days, endless coffees, all of us absolutely certain about futures that turned out nothing like we planned. The yellow front is exactly the same. The girl who used to sit in the window is not.
I stood on the pavement for a minute and did the maths of the years between. London and events. A desk in the City. Right hand to a man who climbed things for a living. Handing out smoothies in a park and calling it a career move - which, as it turned out, it was. Three years of backpacker jobs across the world, learning to travel light. Then came Paris, and a Masters in photojournalism. Then the long arc that followed… Dubai, the Seychelles, Malaysia, France, and finally New Zealand's South Island, where I photographed farms and food and families and light for years, wrote a book, and thought perhaps I was done moving.
I wasn't.
Here is something nobody tells you at twenty-two, certain in a café window: it takes time to find the right room to be in. Years, sometimes. Whole countries. You sit in rooms that are almost right, rooms you've outgrown, rooms you stayed in too long because leaving felt like failure. And then one day, not dramatically, not all at once, you notice the light falling differently, and you realise you're in it.
A year ago I came home. Back to the UK, back to South Oxfordshire, back to the county where all of this started and started again, from scratch, at an age when you're supposed to have it all figured out.
I want to be honest about what this year has actually been, because I have no interest in writing the shiny version. Rebuilding is slow. Money is tight; waking with anxiety sickness is regular. My kids are finding their own way and I am finding mine, often on the same day, sometimes in the same hour. There are mornings it feels like starting over and mornings it feels like starting from… from everything I've learned, everyone I've met, every frame I've ever made.
And here is the thing I keep noticing: I'm doing all the things I did on the other side of the world just in the fields I danced in as a girl, the open barns I slept in, the river where I had my first kiss. I'm photographing working farms through the seasons; lambing, harvest, mud, sky. Food producers. Places to stay. Women building things. An old windmill at Great Haseley that I can't stop returning to. The same work, the same eye, the same love affair with light - pointed now at Oxfordshire.
Standing outside that café, what rose up wasn't regret and it wasn't triumph. It was simpler than both: what a great freaking life I've had. And this is the part 1999 me couldn't have known, it isn't a life that happened and finished. It's a life that keeps beginning.
A year ago I came back with a camera, two amazing humans beside me, five suitcases and no real plan. We were seeking rest, though I've had very little of that. We needed safety and support; both have come from unexpected places. And in 365 days, an unclear plan and a humbled heart have built a solid outlook. Always optimistic, even on the darkest days, what fuels me is ahead.
This week I walked out of Oxford in the evening sun with a card full of images and a diary that's slowly filling with the exact work I love most.
What a difference a year makes. It takes time to find the right room.
If you're in Oxfordshire and you have a farm, a business, a story, a season worth keeping, I'd love to hear from you.
Chlöe x
Chlöe Lodge is a documentary photographer based in South Oxfordshire, photographing farms, food, families and rural life across the county.