Anatomy of a project: Beauty Hunting (part 1)

Ideation (or the lack thereof).

This week, I launched the Kickstarter to print my first ever photography book, Beauty Hunting.

Despite it’s apparent simplicity, this book has been three years in the making - but it didn’t start out as a book at all.

It started as a way to escape.

When the pandemic hit, I was in the process of untangling myself from a decade-long relationship. My then-partner struggled with alcohol addition, and things finally came to a head a few months prior and the decision was made that we had to separate for the good of everyone. I grew up with addition in my family (the generational wounds of that go really deep - and that’s a story for another day), so all that prior trauma was simmering in the background as well.

And then, lockdown.

So there we were, stuck in a tiny house, barely speaking, and with no access to our usual coping mechanism: …