Your List  © Heather Rattray — Your List © Heather Rattray

I think your work gave me a feeling of peaceful and comfortable, both color tone and contrast. Could you talk a little about how do you deal with your photos.

I almost exclusively shoot on film with my Bronica ETRSi medium format camera because I find the colors of film to be so warm and nostalgic feeling. I find scenes that feel calming and quiet to be the most intriguing subject matter. When I look at at an image, I want to feel like I’m back at that place, feeling the way I did when I took the photo. Trying to freeze a moment and convey a feeling is really important to me.

Your words and texts are so powerful and impressed me. How did you arrange these texts with you photos? In the other words, do you create your texts and photos in the same time period, or collect the texts from your daily life?

I usually start by deciding on what I want to focus on, then begin collecting materials for 6 months to a year, sometimes more. When it comes to pairing images and texts, I start by looking at my images, and seeing what feelings or questions I have with each one. If a text answers or speaks to that question, I pair them together. Sometimes texts can ask parallel questions to the images and they can go together as well. I have tried working in different ways in the past (pairing by aesthetics, working solely with images, etc), but it’s never seemed to work for me. I really need to feel the conversation between an image and text, and the resulting authenticity I feel it creates, before they can be put in proximity to one another in a book or body of work.

How do you consider your diary with a photo book? What do you think of threading your photos through texts?

In a lot of ways, my daily notebooks and journals resemble a lot of my “finished” book works – loose papers, images, scribbles and sprawling texts, half finished thoughts and sticky notes. This is generally the way I think, in bits and pieces with thoughts scattered and is disarray. When making art, I want to stay as genuine to this process of understanding as I can, so I make my work in a way that my mind can understand – a mess of all different mediums combined into one. Looking at all sides of something and over a course of sometimes years, really helps shed light on areas you might never have thought about.

Describe your creative process in one word.

Messy!

If you could teach a one-hour class on anything, what would it be?

The joys of being outside! I feel like I could talk endlessly about it.

What was the last book you read or film you saw that inspired you?

Recently, the book “Spirit Transformed: A Journey from Tree to Totem” by Roy Henry Vickers has made me deeply inspired. The photobook tells the story of how a cedar tree becomes a totem pole, told through both art and myth. I would recommend this to anyone who loves the outdoors, as this is truly like poetry to the natural world.