notice – a companion piece

Photo Essay by Wesley Verhoeve

After two years of continuous travel between the great urban centers of New York City, Tokyo, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and other cities, the world ground to a halt.

By virtue of this most random timing, I found myself stuck in a place I had never been to before. A small but beautiful suburban neighborhood of Vancouver was to be my home for the first 5 months of the global pandemic.

Everything that was my “normal” suddenly changed to its opposite. Instead of traveling the globe, I was contained to one neighborhood. Instead of meeting and photographing random people all day long, I’d walk for hours without seeing more than a handful of humans. Instead of my busy client work schedule, my inbox was quiet and days blended together.

So, I started walking.

Every day, a few hours, camera in hand. It became my meditative practice and helped me ground myself in a world where everything suddenly seemed uncertain.

I walked around my small neighborhood for 123 days straight. I practiced slowing down, and paying attention so I could see better. With time, the tiny area to which I was confined proved itself to be a universe filled with tiny bits of beauty and moments of wonder. 

What started as a small project to help me process the world around me, grew into my most ambitious body of work consisting of nearly 35,000 images made over the course of over 800 miles of walking. These are some of my favorite images from this period.

This collection of images is a compendium to Wesley’s photo book “Notice”, to be published in April of 2021. None of the images included appear in the book but were selected especially for Volume 2 of G5A imprint.

Volume 09

clay | chlorophyll | crimson

Grass is green where you water it. LC’s words float along over Misch’s guitar. It’s a phrase that feels so obvious, and I’m sure those who tend to gardens know this more than most, but it seems to land more than before. The impact noticeable, memorable, echoing through my being. Perhaps we’re ingrained to think it’s greener elsewhere. This patch is the problem and not whether we’re watering it. The key is in the watering. How we go about this practice is what defines our patch of grass. No matter where we go, our patch is, perhaps, the same. Some attributes and characteristics have been changed but the essence is the same: Us.

Stepping into Volume 09 of imprint, marks our third year. I am learning that this patch of green that we have been tending to for the last several years will mould, shift, and sculpt. This depends on how we water it and allow it to take its own shape. It has already happened in wonderfully unexpected ways. There is only so much structure or shape we can predetermine. Beyond that, it will absorb what it needs and reject all that is unnecessary. And perhaps, in this practice, we are changed. Our grass is watered as we water that of our writing, our image making, our practice, our magazine.

From light to dark, rigid to supple, new to old, there is so much in between that is bright and vibrant and unexpected. The practice of our magazine has focused on being open to what we receive; being open to deeply listening to what is shared; being open to work taking us to new journeys. This volume, and this year, will be no different. We will continue tending to it as we have done, learning along the way, from past seasons and present ones.

And yet, I know it will be entirely different.
But still.
It will be watered.