On play, and what it teaches us

This weekend I was invited by local photographer Aurélien to join him at an event he was capturing. The opening of a new space for Tap Social, a brewery and social enterprise rooted right here in Oxford.

I walked across the outside space first. Mid-summer. Plants a little dry. The kind of in-between moment a new place has before it fully becomes itself.

Then we opened the door.

Lisa's mural sang from the walls. Music, coffee, the smell of the bakery, plants reaching toward open ceilings. It felt, immediately and completely, like the creative space I have been building in my head for years. The one I haven't made yet. The one I keep returning to.

I wasn't there to work. I was permitted to shoot and that permission, that small loosening of expectation, changed everything.

Play took over.

I listened. I felt. I absorbed. I shot fewer than thirty frames.

These are my favourites.

When we stop trying to produce and start allowing ourselves to experience, something shifts. The images we make in that space, unhurried, uncontracted, unperformed, often tell us more about our voice than a hundred carefully planned shoots.

Play isn't the opposite of professionalism. It's where professionalism comes from.

Aurélien