I will be honest here and admit that the only reason I send mail is to receive mail. I mean, what’s better than getting art and letters made from tangible materials in your mailbox, right? With this in mind, I can’t express how much I value two photographer friends that I’ve made who live on opposite ends of the country and who occasionally grace my mailbox with incredibly generous donations to my aesthetic life. This week, I was happily surprised to find such a package from Shannon, filled with a hefty stack of prints varying in size and color, including a large helping of 11 x 14 prints.

Shannon’s work has been inspiring me for years, before I knew how to use a camera, and even when I wasn’t able to view it on the internet or in my hands, it was there as an idea in my mind. She is so fluidly a documentarian and experimental. She shows no fear, which as a photographer, I think especially, is an obstacle I have had to overcome and still do. She makes more work than anyone I know, save for our friend, Noel Ruiz, but without the kind of warped and incessant need to show everything that I know I feel on  a daily basis. And I admire that (assuming it’s even true), because I really no longer know what it’s like to be left alone with your art. To sit in a room with it and not have the room be a portal to other peoples’ opinions. There’s sincerity there in that space, and a beauty that is imbued in the images from knowing them so well.

Shannon has several bodies of work so it’s hard for me to begin writing about my thoughts regarding the images. I see them individually, but also how they fit into the larger ideas. And I don’t know how much I should share, as it’s not up on the internet for everyone to see. Maybe one day she’ll let me go through her work with her and we’ll make a website and write about it. Her self-portraits, her work in the Tenderloin, Nepal, her images of childhood, her paintings and drawings, her accompanying stories written about the images, and her newer photo project that I think I’m seeing a bit of in a couple of these images.