I seem brave. I know I do.

Creatively, moving countries, starting again, showing up. From the outside it almost appears like nothing fazes me, if only that were the truth.

And it definitely wasn’t when I was younger particularly when it came to adult choices! As many of us are, I was lead by those around me to believe there is one life, one way of doing things, one path. Something inside me longed for something different.

To support my art college days I needed to get part time work, however even though I felt comfortable turning up to the studio, at 19 it took me months to walk into a job agency and apply for work.

The thought of travelling particularly alone was too huge to even comprehend. And the true irony and contrast to today, I never wanted to take pictures of people. Directing them, asking them to do things made me feel nauseous.

I shared this story on Instagram this week, and it goes like this.

New York Marathon, 2002. I’m not a runner. Never have been. Classic English pear. So I power-walked it, in my homemade stars-and-stripes bra, side by side with a team of women. It took us seven hours and we finished in the dark.

What I keep thinking about since posting it is the bra.

I could have waited until I was a runner. I could have dressed the part and hoped nobody noticed I wasn’t one. Instead I walked 26.2 miles as exactly who I was, ridiculous and delighted.

Wearing the bra I’d spent my evenings stitching it at home in my London flat. By day working at Goldman Sachs as an exec PA, by night the ribbon in my fingers, matching thread and plastic stars.

That’s the only kind of brave I’ve ever had. I’ve never found the courage to do things the way other people do them. I’ve found a way I can stand to do them, and kept going.

The work has been the same. I self-published For the Love of the Photograph because I wouldn’t hand over creative control. I made five exposures in one frame in the weeks my life was spiralling too, and I let the dark weeks stay dark.

This week I also reshared the above from 2020. Three pictures in a stack: a slip of orange light in the dark, then rows of small white figures with my own face drifting through them. Between them sits a line from @simplewillphoto that made me beam:

You genuinely inspire me to post the weird shit that I love.

It still makes me beam. There’s no tip in that sentence, and no compliment about a picture. It’s one person’s oddness giving someone else permission for theirs.

Brave travels like that. Sideways, from one person to the next.

Looking at those pictures now, I can see how tidy we’ve all become. Since 2020 we’ve been told to talk to the camera, post daily, dance for our supper and compete with a robot.

I’ve felt it too. I’ve caught myself trimming work to fit the tile. A social media expert shared with me that my feed looks like a beautifully published magazine - funny old game because years ago I would have been delighted with that feedback. Now it feels inaccessible. Who knows.

The weird stuff is usually the first to go, because it never shouts as loudly as the rest of life.

My three words: let’s get back to it.

I have a plan…

That’s all I have for you this week. Whatever you were making before everything came into the room and we all stopped to stare, it’s still there.

All too often we look at others and say ‘but they’re braver than me’. I promise you, it’s not always the case. You don’t need their kind of brave. Find your way of doing it. Powerwalk it if you need to.

Make the bra.

What’s the weird thing you love and stopped posting? Hit reply and tell me. I’d genuinely love to know.

As for me, a week on Friday the girl who couldn’t walk into rooms alone opens one of her own.

Held by What Moves opens on 13 November at The Neighbours Hall, Great Milton, Oxfordshire. The private view is by invitation, and the open exhibition is on Saturday 14 November, 10–5pm. A Walk to the Windmill workshop follows on Sunday 15 November.

There are still four places on my Walk to the Windmill, join us?

Illuminating the grey,

Chlöe x

A LOVE AFFAIR WITH LIGHT is made possible by subscriptions, I am grateful for each one. Words have always been as important to me as the art I make, this is a special place where they co-exist in their fullness.

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Most of the time, our captures disappear: into the depths of our phone memory only to be at ransom when the message flashes up ‘out of space’. Or onto a hard drive which for now we have the connector lead, in five years who knows. And ofcourse there is the feed that scrolls past it in less time than it took to make.

I didn’t want that for this year.

When I started returning to Great Haseley Windmill, I wasn’t thinking about a book. I was thinking about getting through. A new country that was also an old one, children a long way from people they know and love, and a camera as the one familiar thing.

I mentally and emotionally committed to a year although know my own creative tenacity somewhat wains after about six months (I did manage a full 365 once, while being inspired to write a book, a creative journal and build a three month course!!!). The visits were short, allowing my feelings to be front and central before my logical overthinking brain could take over.

The world came in, passed through me, and went back out as a picture.

Somewhere in that year I realised the pictures were holding something. Not the windmill, exactly.

Constancy within change. Something that stands still while everything around it moves. And things that hold you deserve to be held in return.

So I made a book.

Ofcourse I did, its what I do. The tangible, the legacy, the fierce independent self publishing, not allowing anyone else creative control.

Making it was its own kind of returning. It helped me choose the works for the exhibition while simultaneously guiding my hand and words for the show.

I went back through every visit and decided which moments carried the year: the polite first postcards, the spiralling five-exposure frames when life was spiralling too, the dark weeks I let stay dark, and the slow walk back into the light. I sequenced it the way the exhibition is hung, so you walk in through the dark and leave through the light. I have a tendency to look at the dark before the light. The book does it for you.

And I also wanted it to give something back, something that wasn’t so altruistic and more about guiding you too. Artist first, guide that follows. So there’s a chapter at the end called Your Own Windmill.

Monet painted the haystacks near his home more than twenty times, not because haystacks are remarkable but because returning is. Your windmill is somewhere near you already: a tree at the end of the road, a gate, the view from your kitchen window. The book has seven small ways of seeing it new, five questions to ask before you raise the camera, and a week of five-minute invitations to begin.

Printed things change how we look. You can’t scroll a book. You turn a page and stay there. You hand it to someone.

It sits on a shelf and outlives the phone you took the pictures on.

To human is hard. It’s why we have the humanities. And it’s why I’ll always believe our stories should be printed, handled and passed down.

Held By What Moves is the second in a series of small books called A Way of Seeing, each following a place, a season and a way of looking. Avebury comes next, in 2027.

Hold a copy of the book →

And if you’re near Great Milton from 13 to 15 November, come and walk through the room itself.

Into the light,

Chlöe x

At one point my mind cleared and something I’ve been unable to express pushed the door open and made its entrance. Not from the conversation, exactly. More like something the energy in the room invited in.

Dignity.

Not confidence. Dignity.

I’ve been thinking about the difference ever since.

Confidence, I understand. Confidence is what you build in a specific thing - your craft, your skill, your ability to navigate a particular challenge. I’m fortunate enough to have it, for quite some time. A year ago, I had it. I had confidence in my photography, in my work, in the decision to move my children across the world and back again. I knew what I could do.

But somewhere in the last decade, I lost something else. Something quieter and more foundational. I lost my dignity.

dignity (n.)

From the Latin dignitas - worth, merit, prestige.

The state or quality of being worthy of honour or respect. A composed and serious manner or style. A sense of pride in oneself; self-respect.

It took me a long time to name it. Because we don’t really talk about dignity - not in the way we talk about confidence, or resilience, or showing up. Dignity isn’t a workshop you attend. It isn’t on a list of leadership qualities. But I think it might be the thing underneath all of them.

Dignity is the sense of your own inherent worth. Not earned. Not conditional. Not dependent on what you’ve produced this week or how well you’re ageing or whether your children are thriving or whether the work is landing. It’s the bedrock.

And mine had eroded.

Turning fifty did something to me. In the best possible way, slowly. Leadership coaching helped. Moving my body again, walking, caring for animals - things that returned me to myself without requiring me to perform anything. Having, finally, a little money to take care of myself again. Showing up professionally, even when the ground felt uncertain.

I was finding my way back.

And then this weekend, at an event, someone asked me - not unkindly, just casually, as if it were a reasonable question - “do you know what you’re doing?”

Over the past year, I have been told I’m stupid, crazy, that I’m nothing.

I’ve been turning these moments over. Trying to understand what makes them land so hard. And I think it’s this: women’s dignity is so often measured from the outside. As a mother - are you doing it right? As a wife. As a friend. By your hair colour, your clothes, your weight, your fitness levels, what you drink, how old you are, how well you’re holding up against how old you are.

We absorb these measurements. We internalise them. We let them become the standard we hold ourselves to. And slowly, quietly, without quite noticing, we stop being the authority on our own worth.

And social media has made this so much worse, in ways we haven’t quite reckoned with yet.

There is something quietly devastating about a world that puts a monetary value on exposure. That word alone. The thing women have historically fought to keep private, protected, theirs - now reframed as currency. The more you expose, the more you’re worth. The numbers tell you so.

Virality as validation. Visibility as value. And underneath it, the same old measurement, just faster and louder and with a little counter running in the corner so you can’t look away.

I think about my daughter. My son. I want them to know that dignity, yes, it’s an old word, maybe a mid-18th century word, the kind you’d hear on cobbled streets by candlelight, is not stuffy. It is not outdated. It is, if anything, more necessary now than it has ever been. Because the forces working against it have never been more relentless, more ambient, more designed.

You can have ten thousand followers and no dignity. You can have three and carry it completely.

It is not measured in numbers. It never was.

What I saw last night was something different.

A room of women who are, in their various ways - some loudly, some gently - working to strengthen other women’s dignity. Not by telling them they’re wonderful. Not by performing empowerment. By creating space where a woman can turn up, be taken seriously, be challenged intelligently, and leave feeling more like herself than when she arrived.

That is not a small thing.

I’ve been in enough rooms to know how rare it is.

I don’t think I’m the only woman who has had to go looking for her dignity. I suspect most of us, at some point, have had to trace back through the years to find where we left it, and then very carefully, very quietly, carry it home.

The work, I think, is learning to stop outsourcing it.

And finding the rooms - and the people - who remind you that it was yours all along.

Hold onto your light,

Chlöe

Chlöe Lodge is a photographer, author and visual poet based in Oxfordshire. Her work explores light, place and the quieter textures of human experience.

This week I got to hold my work. To physically feel it. Truth be told it wasn’t really my work, it was photographs of mine printed on beautiful soft linen in preparation for Held by What Moves. It’s the first sample so I’d designed a layout with different works on one piece, there to see how the lights, darks and colours render.

Why did it feel so great? I’ll explain…

As a painter I always used my fingers as opposed to brushes when I created with oil. Literally feeling the world from vision, then tube and onto canvas. When I sculpted I used materials I could mould with - tissue dipped in glue, wire, plaster, clay.

I have always ALWAYS needed to be an integral part of my art. Literally creating.

That said, digital photography was an awakening for me back in 2004 when I set off on my travels. It quickly became my note-taking and language. Navigating a lifetime of feeling like my voice wasn’t a worthy part of the conversation, like something stupid would come out, that my brain was working faster than my mouth, that I had too many words and wanted to share too much context of the story... and then WHAM! The digital camera relieved all of that.

I guess this is why - well, I know it’s why - I studied photojournalism rather than studio. Because a studio is where I created with my hands, not my camera. And the world is where I take notes, not make art. It felt safer that way.

Over the years, however, these two parts of me have made friends. Respectfully and often quite poetically they’ve become at one. Knowing that the art I make with my camera is actually happening in its own very mini studio - the camera, Italian for room. It gets to be created, safely away from critical eyes until ready.

And my note-taking? Well that has blended across location and space too.

And then of course there’s the neurodivergent part of my brain that LONGS to hold my art. Longs to feel it, to see the light dance across it, to know that it exists. And let’s be honest, computers, phone screens, social media accounts regularly leave us aching for physical touch, human and otherwise.

I’ve wanted to hold an exhibition of my work, taking up space since about 2021 in New Zealand, occasionally coming close. Then I received the email a few months ago saying my submission had been accepted. It was in that moment, knowing my work was to be in a Royal Photographic Society publication, that the exhibition had to happen.

November is coming ever closer.

This work, my journey, the windmill in its glory amongst the time and transition of seasons, needed to live.

So this week, I walked the sample up to the windmill, carrying it in my arms, tightly. Like it had come home to me. Exactly what the series has done for my heart.

Chlöe xx

There is more on my exhibition here.

The RPS article will be out in October, I’ll be sure to share it.

AND one last thing, to help raise funds for my exhibition I have created this gorgeous cotton tea towel on presale now.

It’s funny how your mind is traveling along a train of thought, and then a little light shines on something you may have passed over. The sceptical part of my brain will say ‘ah thats the algorithm’ but if like me, you’re an observer you will have noticed the lights before the engine even started running.

This morning as I started working on this post the quote about our rear view mirror and our windshield popped up, credited to Ted Lasso, though I suspect it’s older than the show. I wasn’t looking for it. Apparently that’s just how this year works now.

A while ago, I wrote a post about a challenge I was setting myself. We’d just moved. I had ten rooms in a new house and a plan: a portrait of each one, phone first, camera when I was brave enough, curiosity leading rather than pressure. Let’s try this and see what happens, I said. I meant it.

I want to tell you what actually happened, because it isn’t what I promised.

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It’s been healing too. The first long summer with no dramatic disruption. It’s been nice. Really nice.

When I began Light as a Language, I had one foot firmly in New Zealand still. Holding closely to my work from there, examining it with care, feeling its presence even though we were gone. Protecting it as if it were a favourite vase of a recently passed Grandmother.

I held tightly to what I saw and felt. I shared images to illustrate the every type of light. Shared the awakenings. They were my journey. Who I was. And who I am still.

And yet...

As the summer closes, another bridge is crossed.

How does it feel, this transition? From nostalgia and absorption of light, from connection and long days, to a renewed chapter of structure.

One that is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

I have a little secret to whisper … we aren’t who we were at the beginning of this summer. We aren’t ever who we were. Summer days change us. It’s what they are there for. Children grow. The weather becomes the difference in what lies ahead. We get to choose and mould and wonder and dream again.

We get to linger longer.

Then that shift happens. The feel of jumpers on our skin. Socks coming between us and the floor. The light drops into the earth before we’re ready for it to. And as Autumn appears on the horizon, our bodies stand taller, to attention, rigid, prepared.

This is what the changing seasons do. Something I missed when living on the equator. Something so very English.

Returning to ‘home’ has felt like that too. The greatest season change I may ever have experienced.

It’s been a year now. The green now not so overwhelming. The loss of the mountains on the horizon not so empty. The river a muddy brown - until you find the angle of reflection settling quietly.

I’m finding my angles and magnets. The windmill, ofcourse. She’s helped beyond measure.

Finding your magnet, a muse, is truly one of the greatest things we can do to keep us returning. Even on the days when we can’t see what we’re longing to feel and returning to.

Seasonal transitions are inspiring to me. Where we have come from, hot edge enhancing light, soft long summer evenings dripping in gold. To where we are headed, darker drop offs like a Rembrandt being crafted in front of us. Moisture in the air, greyer skies contrasting with leaves of every shade.

This week slow down and feel where the two meet, as you cross this new bridge look back, look forward and look down.

Light IS all around!

Chlöe xx

This evening, in the first rain, I walked.

The summer we bathed in heat while quietly fearing the strike of a match, a dropped cigarette or spark from an engine.

I walked, the crunch of leaves underfoot, fallen early and scorched grass now giving off that strange wet straw smell that you can’t decide if it’s pleasant or repugnant. The humidity steaming up my glasses as I peered down at the envelopes sheltering from the wet inside my coat.

I was delivering invitations to the private view of Held by What Moves.

A year ago these roads felt familiarly unfamiliar. I know what Oxfordshire villages feel like - it’s just been almost two decades since I walked one feeling it was home. A year ago the cottages were pretty picture postcards. Tonight they are homes of new friends. A little bundle of invites. A hand at each door.

November is already in my heart.

The lights glowing from within. The chill at the edge of winter. Christmas beginning its quiet loop in supermarket aisles.

And windmills hanging in a hall.

How, exactly, I’m still deciding. But how wonderful the process of getting there.

Big. They are big.

My work is not small anymore. My voice not quiet. My intention filling the minds of every visitor who walks through that door in November.

I am building a room. Come and stand in it.

Held by What Moves opens 13 November at The Neighbours Hall, Great Milton, Oxfordshire. Private view by invitation. Open exhibition 14 November, 10–5pm. A Walk to the Windmill workshop 15 November - last remaining tickets here

We’ve journeyed across thirty weeks of light together. With season and quality, expression and knowing within the twenty-two more planned.

You may have noticed, I’ve hit a wall.

My curiosity does this. It wonders and wonders and then needs to rest. It has never been good at systematic rhythms, at feeding and providing and constantly showing up on schedule. Thirty weeks is a small miracle, one I am proud of.

The wonder of photography, for me, has always been a two-way street. The image asking something back. So let’s do a little dance. A little expansive art, as I like to call it. Start somewhere, anywhere, and see where it leads.

Right now I am in the throws of adoration for summer light. Quietly fearing the short dark days coming. Already planning how I can squirrel-away light. How I will manage, create, continue the momentum through winter.

I know spring will come. It always does. The flowers tag-teaming across the weeks — snowdrops passing to daffodils, to bluebells, to blossom, to poppies and a dozen more in between. Autumn is already waving its branches at me, the light glowing early this year because of the drought.

I know this. And still I anticipate it.

This summer I have been working on something that kept arriving uninvited into every corner of what I do.

An umbrella name. For the exhibition around the corner. For this love affair with light. For the language of light, the workshop series, the story sessions, the memoir — also a little halted while the summer sun and the last days with my children before school holds my attention.

Holds. Of course it holds.

The umbrella over all of it:

Held in Light.

The camera is held. The stories. The legacy. The voice. For that moment, for always.

I will tell you more as the weeks unfold. For now — we are still here, still looking, still in love with what light does when we pay it enough attention.

Stay eager.

Chlöe CW x

Not with a burger. Not with fries. There was no deal, no bright red background. Just a photograph of a street through a rain-soaked window. The kind of image I love to take. Some of you may remember my laundry-through-the-shower-screen photo — the phone picture that changed so much for me. In the ad, the Paris buildings softened into smudges of amber and grey. In the corner, quietly: McDelivery.

That was the whole ad. One human speaking to another, instead of the usual human selling a product. The feeling of the day you’d order in. They didn’t show the food. They showed the rain.

I shared the McDonalds ad on my stories - I always share things that stop me. Unaffiliated, not sponsored. My enquiring brain sharing it with yours.

Later that day, as the ad filtered down through my internal processing systems, a thought surfaced. Like the bubbling on a fermenting brew. The biggest, loudest, flashiest brand on the planet, built on being the brightest light on every high street in the world, had learned to lower its voice.

And then the memory: a year ago, I hadn’t.

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It’s happened earlier this year than most. The heat of the sun, the dry days one after another. Farmers managing, watching, testing to know when it’s right to surge forward, all hands on deck.

And photographers, many of us love it. That diffusion of the harsh summer light, the movement, the before and after possible within the frame.

Standing on the edge of the field, closer when we have permission and access. The crops contrasted harshly by the power of the sun’s rays. The machine pounds the ground and comes towards you the dust kicked up softening everything.

This week’s light is a light which comes with its own scent. A late summer, dry earth aroma. Hanging in the air, like a gift from the season to create something beautiful. Just how beautiful is up to us.

What this light is

Haze and dust light happens when the air hangs with particles; pollen, dry soil, harvest chaff, distant smoke. They bounce light around, diffusing its direct rays. We talked about mist, they sit in the same room. Sisters not twins. Softened edges, glowing outlines, a golden or amber cast that mist rarely produces on its own but the cause couldn’t be more different. This isn’t water. It’s the land itself, airborne.

At harvest, it’s almost theatrical. Low evening sun through a field’s worth of dust turns an ordinary combine into something that looks lit for a film.

What it reveals

Haze is what’s left behind after something has been worked hard. It’s not incidental to the harvest, it’s the visible evidence of it. Every field being brought in is throwing a little of itself into the air as it goes, and for a few weeks a year, that residue is exactly what makes the light so beautiful and why so many of us are drawn to it.

Photographers love the transient, we basically work with it. Light is transient. Haze and dust shifts that. It’s that incredible layering that makes the stories captured within the frame so powerful. That fleeting, glanced at by those looking through different lenses.

That’s worth sitting with. The most striking light this week comes directly from effort, not despite it. The dust wouldn’t be there without the work. If your own life feels a bit dusty right now, a bit worn, a bit stirred-up from something you’ve been working hard at, it might be worth looking at that dust as evidence rather than mess. Proof that something real has been happening, not a sign that something’s gone wrong.

Ways to live with haze/dust light this week

• If you’re anywhere near farmland this week, go out in the last hour of light and watch what the dust does to it. Stay on the other side of the fence mind, unless you have permission to do otherwise.

• Photograph directly into the light rather than away from it - haze often looks like nothing until you shoot toward the sun.

• Notice the “dust” left behind by your own recent effort. A messy desk (mine is covered in print outs atm), tired legs, an unfinished project and let it register as evidence rather than failure.

• If harvest isn’t near you, look for haze’s urban cousin: heat shimmer off tarmac, exhaust catching low sun, chalk dust in a classroom beam.

• Take one photograph this week of something mid-effort, not finished and polished.

Ask yourself

What visible “dust” is my recent effort leaving behind and can I let it be proof rather than mess?

Where have I mistaken the residue of hard work for a sign that something’s wrong?

What in my life is being worked right now, even if it doesn’t feel golden yet?

When living in rural NZ I was invited to capture the harvest for a brand out there. I had been shooting through the dusty metal roads to our then home, capturing the grain pouring from the silo to feed the animals, however maize was the main crop on the farm so the dust wasn’t there so much. I was gutted at first because there were clouds and I was longing for an amazing sunset, and yet they are some of the most beautiful shots I captured in the deep south.

Three weeks ago I received another invitation, this time in the UK. At the Farm at Avebury. It was a beautiful collaboration moment. We went, camera ready and every smell, sound, vista (although hills and not mountains), broken stalks under foot, hopping across the discarded hay ready for bailing, food out the back of the truck. AND THAT LIGHT. Everything came flooding back. It felt like home. And although this is NOT the life I grew up with, it’s the life I adopted with my open heart, and still very much feels like a huge part of me.

Nobody builds a life or plants a field for the dust in the air, that’s what we get. Seeing the beauty in that is the absolute point to it all.

Go and find the dust in your own week this time, not despite the work, but because of it.

Chlöe xx

This closes the opening set of Volume III — Mist, Rain, Storm, and now Haze.

If you’ve been reading since Volume I, thank you for staying through every kind of light with me. Paid subscriptions keep this going, and Volume II (Weeks 14–26) is available as a keepsake PDF in the Substack store.

On Friday evening, walking back from a graduation shoot in Oxford, camera bag over one shoulder, tripod over the other, feet aching, heart full, I passed Café Coco.

We used to sit in there in 1999. Late uni days, endless coffees, all of us absolutely certain about futures that turned out nothing like we planned. The yellow front is exactly the same. The girl who used to sit in the window is not.

I stood on the pavement for a minute and did the maths of the years between. London and events. A desk in the City. Right hand to a man who climbed things for a living. Handing out smoothies in a park and calling it a career move - which, as it turned out, it was. Three years of backpacker jobs across the world, learning to travel light. Then came Paris, and a Masters in photojournalism. Then the long arc that followed… Dubai, the Seychelles, Malaysia, France, and finally New Zealand’s South Island, where I photographed farms and food and families and light for years, wrote a book, and thought perhaps I was done moving.

I wasn’t.

Here is something nobody tells you at twenty-two, certain in a café window: it takes time to find the right room to be in. Years, sometimes. Whole countries. You sit in rooms that are almost right, rooms you’ve outgrown, rooms you stayed in too long because leaving felt like failure. And then one day, not dramatically, not all at once, you notice the light falling differently, and you realise you’re in it.

A year ago I came home. Back to the UK, back to South Oxfordshire, back to the county where all of this started and started again, from scratch, at an age when you’re supposed to have it all figured out.

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I want to be honest about what this year has actually been, because I have no interest in writing the shiny version. Rebuilding is slow. Money is tight; waking with anxiety sickness is regular. My kids are finding their own way and I am finding mine, often on the same day, sometimes in the same hour. There are mornings it feels like starting over and mornings it feels like starting from… from everything I’ve learned, everyone I’ve met, every frame I’ve ever made.

And here is the thing I keep noticing: I’m doing all the things I did on the other side of the world just in the fields I danced in as a girl, the open barns I slept in, the river where I had my first kiss. I’m photographing working farms through the seasons; lambing, harvest, mud, sky. Food producers. Places to stay. Women building things. An old windmill at Great Haseley that I can’t stop returning to. The same work, the same eye, the same love affair with light - pointed now at Oxfordshire.

Standing outside that café, what rose up wasn’t regret and it wasn’t triumph. It was simpler than both: what a great freaking life I’ve had. And this is the part 1999 me couldn’t have known, it isn’t a life that happened and finished. It’s a life that keeps beginning.

A year ago I came back with a camera, two amazing humans beside me, five suitcases and no real plan. We were seeking rest, though I’ve had very little of that. We needed safety and support; both have come from unexpected places. And in 365 days, an unclear plan and a humbled heart have built a solid outlook. Always optimistic, even on the darkest days, what fuels me is ahead.

This week I walked out of Oxford in the evening sun with a card full of images and a diary that’s slowly filling with the exact work I love most.

What a difference a year makes. It takes time to find the right room.

If you’re in Oxfordshire and you have a farm, a business, a story, a season worth keeping, I’d love to hear from you.

Chlöe x

Chlöe Lodge is a documentary photographer based in South Oxfordshire, photographing farms, food, families and rural life across the county.

Volume III: Learning to Seek

Watch the sky change its mind.

There’s a particular kind of light that only turns up before or after a storm, not during the worst of it, but in the strange, charged minutes either side. The sky goes a colour that doesn’t quite have a name. Everything on the ground suddenly looks lit from within, too vivid for the amount of daylight left to explain it.

This week, I want you to go looking for that light on purpose which means being willing to stand somewhere slightly uncomfortable, at slightly the wrong moment, to catch it.

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Volume III: Learning to Seek

Listen before you look.

Rain light arrives at the ears before it arrives at the eyes.

On the roof, the window, the car outside, that particular hush that means the world outside has changed its mind about something. By the time you actually look up, the light has already shifted underneath it.

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This week I read a post by someone I worked with, years ago, back in my innocent drinks days.

She and her husband opened a little Scandinavian cafe in London. It was supposed to be a fun project for a few years. That was nineteen years ago.

I have watched her grow the whole way. Watched in awe, honestly. Nine books. A second cafe. A warehouse. A community.

And here is the thing I noticed, reading their nineteenth birthday post with a lump in my throat: it was barely about the food. It was about the people. The ones who stayed a while, the ones who stayed for years. The ones who found best friends there. The ones who got married. The human side of what we do.

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.

They talk about their cafe as temporary medicine for homesickness. And I read that line and thought: I know that ache from the inside.

Twenty years. Six countries. A life packed into boxes more times than I can count. I know what homesickness feels like. I know what motherhood loneliness feels like. I know what artist loneliness feels like - and they are cousins, all three. The same hollow, wearing different coats.

I recognise it now, instantly. In myself. In the women in front of my lens. In the creatives I mentor.

And so often, I cure it the same way. With creativity. A camera in my hand, light on a kitchen floor, another human to see and be seen by. That is my temporary medicine. Except it doesn’t feel temporary at all.

Because I carry a dream like that too. I have carried it quietly for a long time.

A creative space. High ceilings and plants everywhere. A messy corner where making is allowed to look like making. An exhibition wall. A coffee bar. Tables where people work alongside each other and look up now and then and talk.

A place built around the human side of creative life.

And alongside it, a bigger dream still, the one underneath everything I make: I want photography books to be enjoyed the way cookery books are enjoyed. Picked up. Leafed through. Left open on the kitchen table. Returned to. Loved until the spine softens.

It is why I wrote For the Love of the Photograph. It is why I am creating the Year of Light as Language volumes. It is why this Substack exists.

People say it is a big dream. Maybe. But more people take pictures these days than cook dinner from fresh ingredients. The audience is already there. The barrier is only habit.

Then, this week, I spent two days photographing on a farm at Avebury.

Harvest time. Dust hanging gold in the evening air behind the baler. A corrugated barn wall catching the last light like it had been waiting all day for it. Knautia spilling over rusted steel, throwing shadows like handwriting. The standing stones at sunset, doubled in-camera five times over, layered to represent their lifeline older than every idea I have ever had.

And driving home, covered in a fine layer of the field, I finally understood why I stumble every single time someone asks me that question.

What kind of photography do you do?

I stumble because the honest answer doesn’t fit in a category. It isn’t ‘family’ or ‘commercial’ or ‘documentary’, though I move through all of them.

The honest answer, in today’s speak, is this:

I create work that AI couldn’t even imagine.

The human touch. The human eye, carrying fifty years of human experience, the countries lived in, the losses survived, the light noticed on ten thousand ordinary mornings, all brought together for a human viewer.

A machine can generate a picture of a harvest. It cannot stand in one at seven in the evening with dust in its throat and decide, in a heartbeat, that this is the moment. It has never waited for anything. It has never loved anything.

That is the kind of photography I do.

Nineteen years ago my friend opened a door in London and let people in. That is the whole secret, I think. Of her cafe, of my dream space, of photography books on kitchen tables, of every frame I make.

You open a door. You let the humans in.

Believe in the light, it is always there.

Chloe x

A LOVE AFFAIR WITH LIGHT is where I share my seeing — weekly light prompts and, now, essays like this one. If this landed somewhere in you, subscribe free, or become a paid supporter and keep the door open.

And if you want to go deeper into light itself:

A Year of Light as Language, Volume One — thirteen weeks, thirteen qualities of light and worksheets, £19.

A Year of Light as Language, Volume Two — the next thirteen weeks, thirteen qualities of light and worksheets, £19.

Volume III: Learning to Seek

Look out of the window this morning.

For those in the North it is summer right now, for those in South mist and fog maybe with you.

And when it is, the world softens without asking your permission. The hedge at the end of the garden has goes quiet. The field beyond it has disappeared, or nearly. The sound is different too; closer, muffled, like the day hasn’t fully decided to begin.

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As we begin to live with light, like a child.

This is a tent.

A small blue tent, pitched in the garden to start with because that is how these things begin, cautiously, in the known, before moving outward into the unknown. In the garden first. Then further.

Inside the tent, a torch. You cannot see the torch. You can only see what it does - the blue fabric made luminous, glowing from within, a small made thing holding its own light against the vastness of a New Zealand night.

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As we begin to live with light, no matter how little.

I want to tell you about a tree.

It wasn’t really a tree. It was sticks. Found sticks, gathered and tied with string into the shape of a tree, stood in a corner of a house where almost nothing else was yet.

Our belongings were somewhere on a ship. Our life was somewhere between the country we had left and the country we had arrived in. It was our first Christmas in New Zealand, and we were making do.

I wound fairy lights around the sticks. And then I stepped back, and I looked at what we had made, and I thought: this is enough.

This is more than enough.

This is, in its way, exactly right.

I photographed it from outside, dusk pressing against the glass, the tiny lights doubling themselves, belonging to both inside and outside simultaneously, anchored to neither. A make-do tree, in a transition time, glowing in the dark like it had always been there.

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As we begin to live with light, remembering.

I want to tell you about a weekend in New Zealand.

(TW this is a story which talks about Lou Jennings, for those who knew her)

About a road at Petone Beach, November 2020. About sea mist and rain just beginning to fall and the sun setting somewhere behind it all, turning the right side of the sky an impossible peach. About two women who had found each other across the distance that screens create and then, finally, closed it.

We had been in the water together. Clothed, both of us, wading into the shallows as the light began to change. The sea was where Lou still felt free. She had been a strong swimmer once, competitive, someone for whom water was a language as fluent as any other. Her condition had taken many things by then. The water was one of the things it hadn’t. So we went in together, up to our waists, in our clothes, in the fading light, because some things are more important than dry trousers.

Lou had no physical voice anymore. She communicated by text - back to the strength of the written word, back to the screen, back to the light we live with. She was a light without sound. A listener. A presence. We had met only once. This was that once.

When we walked back to the road the rain had started. The air was thick with sea mist. The road was empty and wet and the traffic lights were changing - amber to red to green - and there was nobody there to see them but us. Their colours pooled on the surface water. Two lights, changing colour to colour.

I had my camera. I took two photographs.

The first is still. Ethereal. When I posted it I wrote: Never truly knowing, but always believing.

The second I made through double exposure. The same scene, but everything in motion now, the traffic lights streaked and multiplied across the wet road, Turner-ish, all feeling and no resolution. The world as it felt from the inside. Two women. Two parallel paths. One brief and unrepeatable crossing point.

This was a weekend of truth. It was the first time we met. It was also the last.

What is reflected artificial light?

It is what happens when the lights we have made - the traffic signals, the street lamps, the headlights, the neon - meet a surface that gives them back to us transformed.

Water is the great reflector of artificial light. Rain on tarmac. Puddles on pavements. The surface of a canal at night. Water takes the sharp, the functional, the designed-to-illuminate and makes it something else entirely. Soft, elongated, doubled, dreamlike.

Photographically, reflected artificial light is available to anyone, anywhere, on any wet evening. It requires only rain, a surface, a light source, and the willingness to look down instead of up.

What it reveals

Reflected artificial light reveals what transformation does to the ordinary.

A traffic light is functional. Instructional. But catch it in a wet road at dusk, in sea mist, with a setting sun AND suddenly it is asking a completely different question.

Not stop or go, but what are you holding?

What are you moving through?

Reflection transforms.

It takes the literal and makes it felt.

It takes two traffic lights on an empty road in New Zealand and makes them into something that a stranger, seeing the image for the first time five years later, will recognise from somewhere deep inside their own life.

Never truly knowing, but always believing.

That was the caption. It is still the truest thing I know about that evening. Holding on. Watching the light change. Staying present to the colour of the moment even when you cannot see what is coming.

Ways to live with reflected artificial light this week

• Go out after rain. Look down. Find a puddle, a wet pavement, a rain-slicked road under a streetlamp.

• Photograph the reflection rather than the light itself. Notice what the water does to the colour, the shape, the feeling.

• Try a double exposure if your phone allows it (Snapseed is great for this) or simply move the camera slightly during a long exposure. Let the light become what it feels like rather than what it is.

Ask yourself: What in your life is being reflected back to you right now, transformed by the surface it has passed through?

Chlöe CW xx

We are building to VOLUME TWO, are you ready? In the meantime..

‘From the Photograph to a Language in Light’ is available as a beautifully designed PDF guide, complete with a downloadable creative journal to accompany your practice.

Weeks one through thirteen · £19 — instant download

Volume Two — weeks fourteen through twenty-six — coming soon.

YOURS TO KEEP · via CHLOELODGE.COM

For everyone who wants to slow down, pay attention and fall a little more in love with the world they live in.

As we begin to live with light, attentively.

There is a payphone in Wellington, New Zealand, that is still on.

I don’t know if anyone has called from it recently. I suspect not. The world moved on from pay phones quietly, without ceremony one day they were everywhere and necessary, and then they weren’t, and most of us didn’t notice the moment of departure.

But the screen is still glowing.

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Before we begin this week, a moment.

You have just crossed a threshold.

Weeks one through thirteen were about learning to find, follow and trust the light that already exists in the world. The reflected, the window, the back, the golden, the blue. Weeks fourteen through twenty were about the light we choose to live within - the moon, the lamp, the candle.

And now we are here. Week twenty-two. Volume two.

And I want to say something before we go any further, something I should perhaps have said at the very beginning.

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