(That’s a barely eighteen-year-old me in the photo to the right with a 5x7 Cambo monorail view camera, circa 1995. I was in the midst of my first photography project (a book about the history of architecture in Portland) which was to land me in the middle of the East Village in NYC studying to be an architect at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. It would take me another decade to realize that one day, back in 1994, when I had first tucked my head under a black cloth to peer onto an upside-down, backward view of Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery seen through the back of this gigantically big camera, an art shaped window had been indelibly burned into the foyer wall of the house of architecture I thought I was building.

Fast forward to shortly after my 22nd birthday when I had the great (mis)fortune to be killed in a car accident, but then however many minutes later to be brought back to life and after seven days on life support and ten days in a coma, I beat the odds and woke up significantly less messed up than the dead that the doctors had expected considering my injuries. I spent the rest of my twenties recuperating, though with a camera of one kind or other never far from my hands. On my 30th birthday, I opened my Ladybug Organic Café and fell asleep sitting up at my birthday dinner that night because I was so exhausted from all the getting ready for the cafe’s opening. In 2008, I was so nervous on the day of my first solo photography show, that I almost entirely missed the opening. I greatly loved owning a cafe, and in 2009, I received the B.E.S.T Award for Sustainable Food Systems from the City of Portland. The latter half of 2010 would be the end of the Ladybug Café, nine days after closing the café forever, I found out that I was going to be a mamma.

It was a constant choice between diaper bag and camera bag, and my rolls of film were largely populated with pictures of my sweet, bald baby who looked shockingly like me. When that wee lass was two and a half, I took over a consignment store, which I ran poorly for a few years. I had