Grounded in Stillness.

Words for the weekend, from Pico Iyer's TED book The Art of Stillness (which was the first book I read this year, and one of the most memorable): "At some point, all the horizontal trips in the world stop compensating for the need to go deep, into somewhere challenging and unexpected; movement makes most sense when grounded in stillness. In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing could feel more luxurious than paying attention."

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Wishing you a very happy holiday weekend. I'll be back next week with new Non-Career Advice, Recommended Reading, and a POV — thanks so much, in the meantime, for your patience and support as I've shifted gears here a bit. I'm now posting 2-3 times per week instead of five in an effort to be more thoughtful about the material I'm sharing (and to accommodate what's become a busier work schedule) — it's an evolving adventure, and I'm so grateful to have you along on it with me. Thank you so much, as always, for reading!

Photo by Max Wanger.

Henry Hargreaves on FvF.

Very happy to share my latest interview for Freunde von Freunden, which spotlights Brooklyn-based food artist Henry Hargreaves. Henry — whose work includes a photographic documentation  of prisoners' last meals; an Instagram feed showcasing the world's best disposable coffee cups; and a portrait of the queen reconstructed in 1400 slices of toast (pictured below) — has this to say on overcoming the fear of how a creative project might be received: "I've learned not to pay so much attention [to that]. That's one of my strengths: I've got a book of ideas and I'm good at making them happen. I figure, if it sucks, it sucks. Some of the most exciting things come of situations where it's a disaster or it just doesn't work out — that's where the fun stuff happens."

Select photos are also featured on ZEIT Online, under a headline that Google translates quite charmingly to "Art is through his stomach.") Find the interview in its entirety, here.

Visit Henry Hargreaves's website, here. Photographs by Brandon Schulman.

More FvF interviews:
-Huy Bui
-Dez'Mon Omega Fair
-Elizabeth Beer and Brian Janusiak of Project No. 8.

Thanks so much for reading!

POV: Heard.

POV ("point of view") is a series that addresses many of the same themes covered in my Equals Record column: growing up, saying yes to adventure, learning to embrace a quarter-life crisis. While my previous column focused largely on ideas, POV focuses on moments - glimpses, glances, tiny stories. 

Many people who live in New York will tell you, eyes aglaze, that the city speaks to them. If they leave for the summer, it’s the brisk, buzzing air and sidewalks strewn with crimson leaves that draws them back, trance-like, in the fall; at night, it’s a warming cocktail of sirens and subway tremors that delivers them blissfully into the arms of slumber. “I tried moving away once,” someone told me last weekend, “but the sadness I felt when I left wasn’t normal. It was like my fucking wife had died. So I came back.”

Abandoned Love.

New POV to come Saturday; in the meantime: shots from Abandoned Love, a series by 20-year-old photographer Peyton Fulford. Fulford turns snippets from anonymous journal entries and text messages (submitted to her from participants around the world) into spray-painted banners that she posts on abandoned buildings in Columbus, Georgia.

"I sorted all of the messages into categories, and realized that love was the main subject of the majority of the quotes," she writes. "Ultimately I wanted this project to bring light to...feelings that are usually shared privately, behind closed doors."

See more at Abandoned Love. See also: Things I Told the Internet, But Didn't Tell My Mom, a wonderful (and similar) project by Anna Ladd.

Mothers/Daughters.

So much has been said about the bonds between mothers and daughters (this past week especially, with Mother's Day just behind us), but Rania Matar's portraits communicate what can only be depicted in the shifting of eyes, the angling of chins, the grasping of hands. Rania, whose previous work has focused on women at all stages of life, writes that the photographs reflect both "spoken and unspoken conversation," and the complexities of relationships that grow and change as we do — they are, as Rania describes the series itself, works in progress.

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Visit Rania Matar's website, here. Thanks to Lens Culture for the introduction.