📖 Chasing Fog, finding enchantment in a cloud
A rekindled love and depth of appreciation for photography...
“What is life if we cannot dream a real life dream of the one we remember.”
Hi loves,
I have SUCH a beautiful treat for you today. My colleague and soon to be friend (I’m sure) has written to you about her wonderful new book.
She’s also written about photos…
I am always curious when I see photos of myself. Who is that person captured in a still; the person they all see and I do not. I don’t recognise her yet she lives.
In this wonderful piece, Laura explains some of what I think I feel about photos. Reading these words explained to me why I never like any of the professional shots I’ve had taken unless they are on a soft focus and taken from above…
At my recent book launch, I struggled to find a photo I liked because I internalised unkind words and felt disconnected from the joy of just being alive and celebrated. It’s passed now, these things do I suppose. I’ll write more of it in my Rejection Palace anthology. Thank you for all your entries. Next deadline is 1st Jan 2025.
🌿✨
Introducing Laura Pashby
Laura Pashby is the author of Little Stories of Your Life and Chasing Fog. I have one copy of the former to give away.
Laura’s work has appeared in publications including The Simple Things, Ernest Journal, Project Calm, Country Homes & Interiors, Oh Magazine, Metro and Lionheart. She spent three years as the Deputy Editor of independent lifestyle magazine 91 and now works part time as a bookseller in a small indie bookshop in the Cotswolds. Laura writes to over 8000 readers right here on Substack.
📖 You can re stack any of this article to Substack Notes to win. The winner will be notified by 31st August 2024. ✨
Laura’s new book; Chasing Fog releases on 29 August.
Here’s the blurb;
At first, I didn’t find fog – fog found me.
Liminal, transformative and increasingly elusive – far from a simple cloud of water droplets, fog is a state of mind. As mist drifted through a copse of trees, turning a familiar place strange and otherworldly, Laura snapped a photograph and an obsession began.
Pashby hunts for fog, walks and swims in it, explores its often pivotal role in literature, mythology and history, as well as its environmental significance. There has been a 50 per cent drop in 'fog events' in the past fifty years, fog is drifting away without us noticing and the ecological impact could be calamitous.
As she journeys to the foggiest places she can find, Pashby immerses herself in Dartmoor’s dangerous fog, searches for the Scottish haar, experiences Venice’s magical mist, tell us the myths behind the River Severn’s fog and the shipwrecks it hides.
It’s easy to get lost in fog, but sometimes it’s where imperceptible things can be found, including in ourselves. Chasing Fog is a captivating meditation on fog and mist, a love song to weather and nature’s power to transform. Here is the link to pre order Chasing Fog
And if you have time to be inspired and to be held by beautiful words and experiences of this wonderful thing we call life I’ll hand over to Laura… If not, save for later and look forward to making yourself your favourite hot drink for company?
White is the colour that shines in fog
I walk alone amid the trees and fog flows around me like energetic inspiration – I see fog as creative flow made visible. I follow an unknown path, meandering without purpose as cool air touches my face in greeting. Fog is made up of water droplets but to me it is also made up of words, thousands of them – clouding the air and tickling my cheeks – fog always has a message to share. On foggy days, I attempt to catch the weather’s meaning, with fractured voice recordings on my phone and photographs to remind me of the tones in the trees, and of how the woods were transmuted when the light broke briefly through in scattered rays.
When I take my camera out on a foggy morning, what I seek to capture is the way that fog feels: the mood, the story, the physical and also the emotional landscape. If fog’s aura is impossible to replicate, I hope to evoke its emotional resonance. Every picture that I take of the fog says something about who I am – embodying not only what I see, but also the particular way in which I see it. My pictures encompass my response to the fog, which, like this mercurial weather condition, shifts according to mood.
I take self-portraits in the fog, usually wearing a long white dress—white is a colour that shines in the fog, allowing me to be seen more clearly, and creating an ethereal mood. I set up my tripod and step into the frame, my back to the camera. This motif of a figure in the foreground of a painting or photograph viewed from behind is called, I discovered in the writing of my book, a Rückenfigur.
Although I’m happy in front of the camera when I have control of the framing, I do not tend to enjoy having my picture taken by others. When I needed an author portrait for my book cover, I reached out to my dream photographer—Jules Williams. Based in coastal North East England, Jules has an incredible talent for photography and a distinctive, dreamy style. I met Jules a decade ago through Instagram, and we have remained friends ever since. In photography, as in friendship, she has my complete trust—I knew that she would create portraits that fit with the feel of my book and captured me as I am.
One June day, on my way to Edinburgh in search of the Scottish sea fog, haar, I met Jules in one of her secret shoot locations on the North East Coast. The sky was frothed with clouds and a brisk wind blew off the water as we walked alongside the sea. Behind us in the distance was a lighthouse, a recurring motif in my book. Jules put me so completely at ease that I almost forgot about her camera. We walked, and talked––she knew the places where the birds flew and the flowers grew. I stood on the clifftop, skirt swishing and hair blowing. I clambered into the dunes. I twirled in the waves.
On the day Jules sent through the gallery of portraits from our shoot, I almost cried. Her images were stunning, as I knew they would be, and there in her photographs was the distillation of how it felt to be me. It is a gift to be not just seen, but captured as you actually are. When, in a few short weeks, my book is published, my favourite one of Jules’ portraits will be in the back cover. Inside the book, each of the nine chapters will have one of my black and white images as a chapter opener. There is an image for the epilogue, too—myself as a Rückenfigur, white dress swirling as I run into the woods. In the fog, as in Jules’ portraits, I find my most true self.
{The first two paragraphs are an edited extract from Chasing Fog by Laura Pashby, published by Simon & Schuster on 29th August 2024 and now available to pre-order}
Links and places to go for more dreamy inspiration…
Laura Pashby on Substack
Laura on Instagram
📖 REMEMBER - You can re stack any of this article to Substack Notes to win a copy of Laura’s first book. The winner will be notified by 31st August 2024. ✨
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Competition has now closed. 🥰
Thank you so much for having me! 💚🌫️📷