the one who went away
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!
Some of us cannot be free
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
Big Shoes to Fill
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 
The Return
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!
the death of innocence
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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Resurrection
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…
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Adrift
Took this video at my cottage this weekend with the help of my dad and my neighbors, including their daughter Erin who agreed to play the lonely drifter for me. This is sort of an expansion on the idea I had previously created in this photo, but in video version. I’ve been trying to transition into video these past few months, and I’ve been reading a lot and learning a bunch of new programs. It’s such a complicated art form, mostly because it incorporates almost ALL the other art forms…I still have so much to learn! So please forgive the lack of steadiness in the camera- I didn’t have a tripod and I was in water!
Crazy story- somewhere along the course of shooting and then editing this photo I must have come in contact with something unusual as I had an anaphylactic reaction and had to be rushed to the hospital! My lips and throat started swelling up and I got hives all over me- and it kept coming back every 4 or so hours when my Benadryl started running off. How frightening! Especially because I’ve never had one before and I have no idea what it could have been. Thankfully, everything turned out okay- they gave me lots of drugs and I ended up finishing the editing while lying in the E.R.. Oh the adventures that come along with shooting!
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Sea of Broken Dreams
Via Flickr:
This will most definitely go down in history as my most dangerous shoot ever. I was so scared to crawl across the melting ice caps at my cottage to get this, I almost didn’t do it! But I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t, and I was right. So thankful not to have fallen through to that ice water below!
I have never been away from flickr this long before. Feels weird, but at the same time quite refreshing. I’ve had so much going on the past 4 months with my dollhouse show (which was a success!) and obtaining a new visa to live in the U.S. (which I am currently home in Canada waiting on), that I’ve scarcely had time to think about photography. After all this time away, it felt strangely blissful to sprawl across the melting ice in sheer agony. Like coming home