Best of 2022

By Rebecca

December 31^st, 2022

At long last (I know you've all been at the edges of your seats!), here are my top ten photos from 2022.

Past top 10 posts: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017.

And companion #fromwhereistand posts: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019.

February: Antarctica

Early in the year, mom and I went on the trip of a lifetime, to Antarctica. It was February 2022, and the company we were traveling with had just begun sailing again after COVID. Argentina’s COVID rules were impractical for travelers, so the company changed their starting point to Chile, which, while possible, was still a huge challenge as a tourist. We had to test before departure and immediately upon arrival, then again before getting on the ship, where we tested every other day. It was miraculous that we escaped unscathed, and that only one person in our cohort tested positive (and was immediately isolated).

Anyways, that’s not that interesting. Let’s talk about penguins! The leader of our expedition crew, David, promised us that we would see penguins and we would see ice, and he didn’t let us down. I took this picture at Jougla Point, our first penguin colony experience. The weather was unreal (fabulously blue skies, barely a cloud to be seen, and above freezing temperatures). The smell was...memorable, and one we would come to know well. It was most evocative of rotting fish, but that makes it sound worse than it was; mostly, it was thick and sharp. The trick was not to slip and fall into piles of the reddish stuff, which was basically everywhere. I don’t remember if the noise in this particular colony was deafening, but it probably wasn’t a serene, quiet experience.

This particular scene struck me as feeling ideal, almost artificial, practically a diorama in a museum. You know, “penguin life.”

Penguins lead two parallel lives. On land they are just ridiculous; they waddle and fall down and waddle some more. They seem too funny to be real. And they really don’t mind people too much (though of course we were instructed to keep our distance and make way at all times, as a condition of our travel).

Where penguins make sense, though, is in the water. They’re basically only on land as a stopgap. Underwater, they are fast, aerodynamic, optimized. They “porpoise” as they swim, jumping above the water and elegantly back into it, like dolphins.

Coming ashore, it’s a bit like splitting the difference. They approach the water's edge, then poof they hop out of the water and onto the rocky shore, sometimes shaking themselves off like this fellow here. Once on dry land, they spend a lot of time preening and aligning their feathers, and making sure they’re oiled just right; this maintenance gives them speed and insulation, and without it, they’ll die (either of cold, or of being picked off by a predator if they can’t keep up with others).

For this particular shot, I was along the shore, walking amongst surprisingly clean rocks (read: no poop). They were so clean that I crouched, then eventually laid down entirely on my front, aiming the camera parallel to the coastline. I was especially lucky to capture the stream of water from this guy’s beak forming a single complete ring above his head as he shook himself off.

You may think I’m being a bit self-indulgent to include three pictures of this one trip when selecting my top ten photos of the year. But what if I told you that almost half of the pictures I took in the year 2022, I took on this trip? Glad you’re back with me :)

I took this picture from the deck directly behind the dining area on the ship, so just above water level. It was morning, and we had dropped anchor in Paradise Harbor. We were surrounded by a ring of white fog that completely dissipated soon after this picture , giving us another day of seriously trippy bright blue skies. I just love the faint outline of white peaks behind the fog in the distance as this staff member rinses off our zodiacs to prepare for our harbor cruise later in the morning, the stream of water from his hose slicing across the frame.

March: Kew Gardens

I don’t have too much to say about this one, except I’m a sucker for a good glasshouse and obviously Kew Garens doesn’t disappoint. It was a bit of a hike to get there from our hotel in Notting Hill, but it was a great way to round out a weekend we spent eating well, exploring Portobello Road, and dressing up in our Regency finest for a Bridgerton party.

April: Mary

Mary, you are my fashion hero.

I have not always been interested in enacting my gender role. I don’t spend time on my hair. Despite flirting on and off with makeup over the decades, it just hasn’t taken. I go through phases with my nails, stopping biting them consistently enough every few years to occasionally be proud of them and sometimes slap on a coat of polish or two. But these are always passing flings, and I don’t think I’ll ever really care too much about them.

How I dress, on the other hand, is another matter.

In school, I was part nerd, part wanna-be jock. I played sports, but also did music things and hung with a theater crowd. Aside from some truly tragic outfits (I can name them now: in 5th grade, my favorite thing to wear was a white long-sleeve thermal waffle tee with navy sweatpants -- yes, gathered at the ankles -- and black and white Airwalks. In high school, it was a navy-and-orange striped LL Bean rugby shirt with a white collar, gray sweatpants, a dusty purple hat I had knit for myself that was far too big around but also too short, and light brown suede Birkenstock clogs, which I guess have come back around to being coveted...), I think I mostly dressed for convenience, or to fit in. Athleisure-style tops or tee shirts, jeans, sneakers. Somehow I was always two steps behind, though, when I most desperately wanted to be cool. I visited Penn for a weekend during my senior year, and slept on the dorm room floor of a WJ Lacrosse alum who was a freshman at the time. It was 2003 and somehow I had made the decision to spend a weekend on a college campus without bringing a pair of jeans. When the girls asked me what I was going to wear to come out with them...I can’t even remember how that conversation went. I think I wore black Nike gym pants that zipped up at the ankles. I shudder to think of it.

Slowly, slowly, over the years I moved on slightly. But it wasn't gelling. I found myself wishing I had a personal style, a vibe, that was mine.

And honestly, I don’t know how it happened, but in the last few years, I’ve really turned a corner and built a collection of pieces I’m really happy with. Things that are really me, and look good, and aren’t what you see every day. Often, when I shop and find something new but I’m on the fence, Mary’s voice is the one I hear in my head:

Me: “I want to be cool enough to wear this.”

Mary: “You know, the way to be cool enough to wear this is to buy it and wear it.”

I took this picture of Mary on Porta 400 film in my mom’s old Canon AE-1 in Bristol, just a few hundred meters up the street from my flat. We had talked about it for a while: I wanted to practice film portraits, and Mary was game to be my model. She packed a small duffel of outfits and we set off. I didn’t have a real plan, but said I wanted to make it Bristol, capture the grit and the architecture of the place. Then, in the end, I ended up asking Mary to basically embed herself in every flowering bush we walked past. It was really hard to choose a fav but I love the intensity of this one.

May: Epilogue

By being a person interested in art on Instagram, it seems inevitable that I would encounter CJ Hendry, a hyper-realistic illustrator and installation artist. She creates these huge, amazing colored-pencil drawings of flowers, sneakers dipped in paint, mylar balloons...lots of things. Then she gets hooked on a concept and goes all out to make it happen -- case in point, buying and refurbishing a church in London and outfitting it with confetti machines set up to drop a steady stream of petal-shaped custom confetti for a week straight.

I got to go to this exhibit, entitled Epilogue, in London this past year; it was rescheduled from 2020 and I just managed to make time to stop by on my way through London. It was a whirlwind month, May: a weekend in rural Northern California for a friend’s wedding, back to work for a few days, then a work trip to Switzerland, which I extended for some personal time with friends before going straight to Belgium for work the following week. Oh and Claus and I got engaged! CJ’s exhibit was for two weekends, but between all of those happenings, the only time I could catch it was after the wedding, between Heathrow and catching the GWR back to Bristol.

The line to get into the church wasn’t too long; I waited less than half an hour. At the door, we were each given a pair of booties to put over our shoes, to keep the confetti clean. It was a few days into the exhibit, so the delicate petals lay in a layer over a foot deep throughout the space. Our booties on, we sloshed through it, picking up handfuls and tossing them into the air, letting new bursts fall on us from the vaulted ceilings. These two girls, like many, were posing for the perfect selfie amidst it all.

May: Locarno

What a perfect weekend this was. Mary, Laurel, and I were all on site at our customer in Lucerne, and Felicity was basically always either on her way to or from Switzerland, so we arranged to spend a weekend exploring the country. The week leading up to it had been unusually sunny and warm, so much so that upon my arrival, I had to stop for ice cream twice on my first walk around town (I know, what a hardship).

After our final on site day on Friday, we worked up a sweat climbing the hill for wine and snacks before catching the train to Locarno, a town in Southern Italy on the shores of Lake Maggiore. Laurel had found us a lovely inn (though it was a ways up the mountain), and our weekend was ideal: dinner on the water Friday, a leisurely hike along a river on Saturday ending with a chilly swim followed by dinner with views of the entire lake and valley, etc. On Sunday, we wanted to enjoy ourselves on the water and tried to do some research and planning, but ended up just walking down to the lake and renting a paddle boat. It wasn’t the kind you might be thinking of, just big enough for two people. It was huge, with two bright orange seats for the two paddlers then a large area with striped lounge chairs for two additional passengers.

We rented the boat for an hour, and took our time, taking turns paddling and relaxing, with breaks for swimming. In fact, we enjoyed ourselves so much that we brought the boat back to shore and went to buy drinks, then rented it for another few hours. This photo of Laurel diving into the cool, clean lake simply sums it up.

July: Brighton

As a farewell to England, Claus and I took a road trip through the southeast in July. We stayed in Brighton, Canterbury, and Rye. We saw the cliffs of Dover, had tea in Peter Cushing’s favorite tea shop in Whitstable, and visited Charles Darwin’s residence. In Brighton, we ate fabulous food, shopped in a town where there were more fashionable men's clothing shops than women's ones, and went to the beach, where Claus had his first Mr. Whippy (yes, with flake).

On our first evening in Brighton, we walked around, cooling off from the drive (my car, bless her, served me well but had no air conditioning, and this was the week leading up to the record heatwave when it reached 40 degrees C in and around London). So basically, I was pooped. But the air was much cooler by the sea and in the gardens around Brighton Pavillion, where I snapped this shot at sunset.

July: East Sussex

As we drove around East Sussex, Claus and I saw numerous buildings with a similar and baffling design. They were brick, sometimes square but often cylindrical, and the roofs were squat, abrupt cones, culminating in white caps that looked sort of like the top of a bee smoker. Not that we did much research, but we couldn’t guess what the purpose of such a building was.

One night we went to dinner outside Rye at Tillingham Winery, where they have a restaurant in a truly pleasant setting. As we approached, we noticed two of these distinct buildings just to the left of the restaurant and inn. I asked our host what they were, and she enlightened us. “Oast houses,” she said, “for drying hops.”

We were charmed. From then on we saw them everywhere, and were particularly excited to find these examples at Great Dixter House and Gardens, where we were able to go in and take a peek around. They were no longer in use, of course, but there were some historical photographs of the days when they were, and we were finally satisfying our curiosity. If you ever want to buy Claus and me a historic oast house to live in or lovingly restore, please feel free.

October: Senior Portraits

This isn’t my first time taking pictures of T, my coworker Ed’s son; I had the pleasure of photographing T’s bar mitzvah party, which took the form of bubble soccer at Keva, several years back. So when Dawn, T’s mom, asked if I would be willing to take his senior portraits, I was totally on board.

Ed and Dawn had only a few requests -- maybe somewhere pretty on Epic’s campus, and that T refrain from getting his septum pierced until after our photo shoot -- so it was easy to satisfy both. We picked a Sunday and lucked out with overcast weather that didn’t turn into rain until we were basically done anyway.

T was very chill, so I took the lead; we started with a few spots Ed had suggested. As we finished up our time on the Wizard’s Campus, I suggested that we try to make something happen with a few young-looking ginkgo trees that were blazing yellow. It turns out ginkgo trees are T’s favorite!