Before you share your story…

Let me tell you mine…

Photography first entered my life in 2018 through a mobile phone camera and a growing need to capture what held my attention. In 2022, after saving for my first Fujifilm camera, that quiet pull became something more deliberate, opening a deeper relationship with image-making and with the way I see the world.

My photography is rooted in observation, emotion, and the quiet details that reveal what is often left unspoken. I am drawn to work that feels lived rather than polished, and to images that hold something of memory, presence, atmosphere, and human or cultural story.

My work is created entirely in-camera, without post-editing. I am drawn to the honesty of images shaped in the moment, where light, texture, atmosphere, and timing are allowed to remain as they were found.

I currently shoot with a Fujifilm X-T200.

I could not simply receive the world as it was handed to me...

I have always seen life differently, as if I were born an observer. An Alien in a world whose ways I have never quite understood. Not Alien as a metaphor only, but as a feeling that has lived with me since birth: the sense that this planet, with all its rules, behaviours, and expectations, has never fully felt like home.

From a young age, I found myself watching. Nature, people, patterns, gestures, silences, the small ways life moves around us. I would try to understand why things are as they are, why people act as they do, why the world unfolds so vastly and so differently for each of us. I still spend hours thinking, questioning, and meditating on life, especially in a world I often feel I do not belong in.

Introspection has been a constant companion. It was not taught to me. It was not imposed. It was simply there, something I seemed to be born carrying: the need to question, to reflect, to make sense of what happens around me. I remember my mum often asking me, “Why can you never just accept what we tell you? Why do you always need to question everything?”

And perhaps that has always been the heart of it. I could not simply receive the world as it was handed to me. I needed to turn it over, compare it, feel its weight, and understand where I stood among it, or perhaps why I so often felt I stood outside it.

Storytelling and image-making became woven together...

When photography entered my life, I discovered another language. A way to capture not only what was in front of me, but what I felt passing through a moment. Through the camera, I found a way to give shape to feelings I could not always explain. Over time, storytelling and image-making became woven together, helping me interpret the thoughts and emotions that move through my Alien mind. Although I still feel some feelings and concepts are beyond anything an image or words could express, and those, I carry only for me.

I never set out to become a professional photographer, and I am sure that is not the path I am looking for. But I have found myself becoming a photographic artist, someone who shapes photography through her own sense of meaning, feeling, and vision.

It may not be polished in the conventional sense. It may not fit neatly into what others define as photography. But it is unique to me, I don't see it as good or bad, worse or better than any other work, it is just me.

It is my way of seeing, and my way of offering something for others to see too, if they are willing to look closely...

THIS JOURNEY

An Alien in a World not quite prepared

Through this journey, piece by piece, you may begin to see a little of the world as it passes through my lens and through my mind. Not a mind searching for a place to fit in, because I have never truly felt I needed to. I have learned that we can relate, live, experience, learn, teach, and love while remaining who we are, in our own nature, our own kind, our own way of being. And perhaps it is why I landed on this planet?

There is space on Earth for everything: for every difference, every form of life, every race, every way of existing.

So I am simply being me, an Alien in a world that may not be quite prepared for that yet, but one I still hope, one day, will be.

Through sharing people’s stories, I hope to offer a space for reflection. A way to remember that we are less than a speck of dust beside the vastness of the universe, and yet we are still part of its tapestry, each of us a thread among billions of weaves. Yet, we all have a space to be, because no beautiful tapestry was ever formed from one thread alone, one colour, one texture, one way of expressing.

We are part of something larger, whether we notice it or not...

A full picture needs thousands of tiny pixels to become whole. And we are, each one of us, one of those almost invisible pixels. Small, yes, but not meaningless. Part of something larger, whether we notice it or not.

Perhaps the question is not whether we belong to the picture, but which picture we choose to help create where we are now, in the planet we currently chose to live.

I hope we all choose the picture of love...

JEN C

My Riding Journey Unfolded

It began as a necessity, a simple need to move more freely through the world. At first, it wore the face of fear. It felt like something I was not made for, something too big, too exposed, too far from who I thought I was! More than once, I found myself wondering why on earth I had chosen this at all.

And then, quietly, something changed.

The fear did not disappear all at once, but it began to loosen its grip. In its place came something else: the thrill, the feeling, the freedom. They arrived slowly, almost unnoticed, until one day I realised they had taken root. What had begun as a practical need had become a passion. And then, deeper still, it became love.

But love does not grow on feeling alone... It asks to be fed. It asks courage. It asks that we keep meeting our fears, again and again, until what once felt impossible becomes part of us. And that is what riding became for me.

It became the thing that carries me through the end of a long shift, the thing I look forward to when the day feels heavy. It became the space where my mind can breathe, where the noise of life settles enough for me to process the weight of each month and all it brings. It became the thing that keeps me curious and engaged, whether something breaks, needs fixing, or simply tempts me into changing it for no reason other than joy!

It is no longer just a way of getting from one place to another. It is no longer only a mobility aid. It has become expression, liberation, freedom. A quiet reminder that even in a world so often filled with chaos, there are still moments waiting for me out there, moments on my bike that return a smile to my face and something lighter to my spirit. Solitude, oh, there is something about the solitude of riding...

The fear is not gone. Some of it still lives there. The fear of the unknown. The fear of not yet having the skills a moment may ask of me. The fear of breaking down, of falling, of skidding. But beside those fears lives something else too: the possibility of meeting them, moving through them, and coming out stronger on the other side.

Riding asks something of me, constantly... It asks me to grow. To be braver. To face fear without ever letting go of caution, discipline, and respect, the quiet companions that ride beside me. In return, it has opened doors to new friendships, new places, and new parts of myself I may never have met otherwise.