You are more alive now
Than you ever were in life.
More beautiful in breathlessness
Than a china doll
Propped in a toy-shop window.
Night after night
I reach out
As the hand that reaches for a pocket that isn’t there.
Your beauty burns like a mirage on the horizon
My flesh aches like a desert
Dreaming of the sea.
Nocturnal whisperer,
Will you stay with me this once?
Will you consummate our souls into constellations
So that we can be reborn
Like stars in the night?
Or will you wane like an echo
Fainter and fainter
Til at last
These idle tears are spent
Like moon pools in the dawn?
—-
Took this in Badwater Basin in Death Valley last week. I had such an incredible experience being in the desert. I’ve wanted to go for almost 2 years now, so this trip was long overdue. I shot this at dawn with the help of my friend Dan holding the skeleton. We had quite a time lugging this huge skeleton across the basin and getting him to pose properly!
Recently, I was asked to do an interview with the blog Lights n’ Colours about my photography. We talked about how I got into conceptual photography and how I go about executing my pictures. I encourage all photographers to head over and check out their blog. Highly informative and interesting for anyone interested in taking better pictures!
This image is very personal to me. The idea here is that in spite of the beauty of the world, many of us will never truly be free to enjoy it because we are trapped- trapped by dogma, trapped by routine, trapped by our inability to escape their own emotions. I often feel that way myself. It’s a recurring theme in my work, the idea of being trapped within my body and trying to escape somehow. The fact that, in spite of the beauty of this setting, these birds are still a cage while seagulls fly free, says it all for me. How often do we feel alone or cut-off from the world in spite of what’s going on around us? How often is it all in our minds?
On a lighter note, I am about to launch workshops, both online and in person here in L.A.! They will be about conceptual photography with a heavy focus on photoshop. Participants will be taken through my process, from finding inspiration to compositing and post-processing, with a focus on discovering your own unique voice and ideas. Anyone interested can shoot me an email at leah@leahjohnston.com
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It’s times like these, when I don’t have a lot of new photography ideas coming in, that I’m thankful I have a backlog of images written down in my notebooks. This is one of the first photo ideas I ever had. I had actually started believing that this photo would only ever exist as an ugly stick figure in a notebook. Very relieved to see it alive and well in the world. It’s like a weight has been lifted!
The sentiment behind this photo rings very true for my life right now. I feel very overwhelmed and confused by expectations, both from myself and from the world around me. It’s time like these when I have to remind myself to just put one foot in front of the other and keep creating. Photography is like a spinning wheel of creativity. No matter what else I have going on in life, it’s always good to have a photo in the works somehow. Keeps me creative, fresh ahd motivated. It’s the one place in life where there are no compromises, apologies or regrets. This is my vision and mine alone 
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the idea of relationship in photography and how creating interesting relationships in our images helps us not only tell better stories, but create better images.
In acting class, the teacher will often ask the actor, “What is your relationship to the other character in this scene?” This is of course an important question, as it forces the actor to consider how he is interacting with the other character. If the character is in a scene talking to his sister as though he is in love with her, that certainly affects the story being portrayed to the audience, now doesn’t it?
Similarly, I have found this idea of relationship to be important to photography; It is often the difference between an image that is merely pretty and one that is truly compelling. In my opinion, anyone can learn to take a photo that is aesthetically pleasing, but it takes good storytelling skills to create images that are engaging to its viewers.
But how then does one convey a story in a medium without dialogue or motion and with only a single shot to do it? One of the ways we imply story through photos is through the use of relationship. Here are a couple of the main ways we can create relationship in our photos:
Relationship to Others:
This might be the most obvious one to come to mind. Putting more than one person in frame interacting with one each other immediately implies some sort of a relationship, and thus makes the image much more interesting. We see this often in couple portraits or in documentary images where people are interacting with each other on the street. A few less obvious uses of this type of relationship, could be a relationship to animals, or in the case of a self-portrait artist like me, relationship to multiple selves repeated within the shot. In my shot, Duality, the relationship of these two selves implies a story about the different sides of my personality:
Relationship to Surroundings:
Another relationship that helps tell an interesting story is the relationship of a person to his or her environment. It can be as simple as a wall that they are touching, or as expansive as a field. What’s most important here is how they relate to their surroundings and what emotion or story it conveys. In the case of my image, An Unforeseen Calling, it is not the sun shining through the clouds, nor the wind tossing the character’s hair that makes it interesting (although they do add to the aesthetic quality of the image). It is the relationship of the character to the sun which seemingly beckons her forward that makes this image interesting in terms of story.
Relationship to an Object/Prop:
The relationship of a person to a prop- be it a book, a mask, a television, or even something less obvious like a piece of fabric used in a creative way can be a great way to tell a story and make an image more compelling. This inspires a lot of creativity, because a person can have any number of different relationships to a single inanimate object- there are literally countless ways to interact with them.
In this recent image, The Death of Innocence, the characters relationship to the mummy implies a plethora of possible backstories stories to the viewer:
Or in the case of the image IF, my relationship to a simple thread creates a conflict for the because I am trapped by it.
Relationship to Self:
This type of relationship is a bit more abstract but it is used often in emotive portraits, especially self-portraits. The relationship here is more inward, and by the gesture or expression of the person we are drawn into the internal emotions being conveyed. In the image ‘My Passion Has No Voice,’ we see a women filled with regret and longing, and we are pulled into her inner conflict.
And last but not least…
Relationship to Camera:
This is a relationship I often see used in more straight-forward portraits. The person looks directly at the camera which could be boring and lifeless, and yet in certain photographs it is quite compelling because the expression implies a relationship to the camera. I would put the Mona Lisa in this category as well as a lot of great documentary photography I’ve seen, especially this very famous one.
All these kinds of relationships help tell a better photographic story and make our images more captivating to the viewer. For those not interested in photographing people or telling stories, this idea might not apply, but I have found it to be very useful in my own photography, especially in self-portraits, where there is usually no one else to interact with, so I am forced come up with new and exciting types of relationships to convey. So next time you’re wondering how to make a more interesting photo, consider what type of relationship within the photo you are trying to convey. I find very often the images that don’t work for me conceptually are ones where I haven’t established a good relationship to anything in the photo. Props and people are a boundless source of inspiration for relationship because there are so many ways you can interact with them. If you are lacking inspiration, you can always try changing your relationship in the photo or using a different kind of relationship, as described above.
Hope this article was helpful, and happy shooting!
xo
This was shot around the same time as this image and was intended to be a kind of sister image. I wanted to imply a story of a woman whose body is washed ashore after some kind of shipwreck, whose soul then arises and returns to the sea…not sure if that’s evident from the poses but that is what I was thinking of when I created it.
What a struggle it’s been this past week to create! I have been weening off a high dose of steroids after my anaphylactic episodes and I’m finally finishing my meds after almost a full month. While I hated how puffy the drugs made my face, I gotta say, it was amazing how energetic and productive those drugs made me. Now I’m totally crashing after a month long high and it isn’t pretty. Back to normal Leah, who sleeps 8-10 hours and struggles every morning to get out of bed. As much as I hate being on steroids, I wish I could take some of that boundless energy with me. Amazing how much you get done when you don’t need sleep 
For anyone who’s interested, I’ll be doing a give away of a print on my facebook page after it reaches 1,000. We are only 2 away, so please join up in the next day or two if you want to be elligible to receive it!
I’ve had this photo in my head for a long time now. Almost a year. It’s strange shooting something you’ve thought about for that long. I was almost nervous when I was prepping the mummy, and then I was so surprised when I was shooting at how different it looked than it did in my mind. You can’t tell, but this was shot at the top of a mountain. I was so grateful to my friend Adam Knapp, who not only assisted me hauling this mannequin up to the treacherous location, but also in achieving this very high angle that I would not have been able to get with just my tripod.
The initial concept behind this was that the body symbolized the corpse of our childhood dreams; The horrible realization we have as adults that so many of the things we hoped and wished for as youths are never going to happen. It seems to me letting go of those hopes can be one of the most painful losses a person can go through. Almost like a death of sorts.
Of course, I encourage people to imagine whatever backstory they like. Always curious to hear your interpretations.
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I want to start by thanking everyone who has been patient in following my work through it’s spurts and lags. Some people were asking were I’ve been, and I get the sense that people are sort of confused about why I’m so touch and go about my photography. Although I feel the community on flickr gives me a wonderful drive to continuously create, I must admit have somewhat intentionally been avoiding it lately because I felt it was getting in the way of my creative growth. I am passionate about photography, but I have always done many creative things and I need to continue evolving into other realms. I see film as having the power to sync all my artistic passions into one medium and I’ve been powering ahead with it full force. I’m starting small- taking short videos to learn with as I have never been to film school and don’t intend on going. I’ll continue to upload them here as well as my photography which I plan on keeping up as I continue. But perhaps with a little less, how shall we say, flickrian-paced fervor as I once did. Photos are such quick and satisfying projects. They allow me to express myself in powerful yet simplistic ways. And they are actually experienced by others, often en masse, which is more than one can say about poetry, plays, and most other art forms that come to mind. I love the medium, but I also want more. So believe me when I say I am not stopping, I just am regaining my sense of balance a little bit
On that note, please excuse me while I go crash after this 18 hour editing bender…
