Personal essay by the artist Cassie Reeder
“Through Mornings; Naked Routine I want to share the power of intimacy and softness. I want to touch peoples’ lives in a way that causes them to spend time, even just a few moments, to remember that within them are happiness, joy, and love.”
Deep in thought one morning I came to appreciate how important my morning coffee was to me, how spending just that extra three minutes with my cat in the sun could drastically alter the way I interacted with the day. With this came the realization that mornings are the beginning of a cold war. Blood isn’t shed, but guerilla warfare goes on between the individual psyche and society. This is why we must start each day with softness Mornings; Naked Routine is the visual breakfast feeding the discussion of the necessity of self care, softness, and intimacy with oneself. Life is often described as being harsh, brutal even. Today, the world is an intricate assembly of electronic interactions, rapid information sharing, fifteen second sound bites, and competition. Well, at least that is what we see. There is so much more to life and experience; so much we forget or have yet to realize is embedded in our lives.
Each day we wake up and prepare for our day with a unique routine. After we settle into half awareness we move through the motions of our distinctive rituals. All of us begin differently yet we have a common end, preparing for the world having slathered ourselves in masks and façades. We have set up barriers to allow ourselves to make it through the following hours unscathed. We live under scrutiny and unrealistic beauty standards and fiercely competitive mental expectations. But before we face all this, when we are at our most raw we are the most perfect human beings we could possibly be.
Mornings; Naked Routine is a visual discussion of intimacy and softness. The series is comprised of analogue images, shot with a 35 mm camera and film. Film holds a great deal of similarities to the nude groggy rising body in the wee hours of a day. It is prone to softness. It can be simultaneously raw and confronting and also gentle and relatable. There are often imperfections, unavoidable in the same way that our own flaws seem to be it’s what makes us real. Film must be processed with care and attention, just like each and every one of us; otherwise it, like us, will fail to produce. This series of photographs attempts to capture all these intricacies and intimacies. It works to promote positive body image by enunciating the beauty of bodies belonging to real and unedited human beings, altered only by the choices of self-care they make each morning in their private morning rituals.
Intimacy: the state of being very private; closely personal. Intimacy is not only fickle, but also indiscriminately complex. An intimate moment has the connotation of being soft and quiet, personal and unique. Realistically, intimacy is also intense and universal and loud – so loud it can silence everything around you. Intimacy is a gauge by which to analyze our relationships. The comfort and ease with which we interact with others allows for us to share intimacy with others, to construct meaningful interactions. We give away little pieces of ourselves and then wait to receive them back after they have been touched and thought over. Softness goes hand in hand with this. Softness can be found in the dirty sheets of an old bed, in the warmth of a hot cup of tea, or in a steamy shower. It can be found in the time spent relaxing inside a world between pages of a book, or in the quiet space between two arms embracing you warmly. Softness can be a state of mind where you remember that you are a human being surrounded by other human beings all trying to survive each day the best you can. It’s a state of being where you actively work towards making your life one full of care and compassion.
Through Mornings; Naked Routine I want to share the power of intimacy and softness. I want to touch peoples’ lives in a way that causes them to spend time, even just a few moments, to remember that within them are happiness, joy, and love. Morning routines are a pivotal part of the day where the ego is gently prepared to battle against the harshness of life. These images record the feeding of the body and the mind. The people here are not models; they are not staging a performance. We sat and experienced the real ways in which they care for themselves on any typical day. We had hot tea and coffee. We sat listening to the ocean, fit within the walls of white bath tubs, cleansing and calm as steam rose and the water rinsed away filth far deeper than the epidermis. We read and cooked hot breakfast, and gentle half formed conversations trickled out as minds awoke from the solitude of sleep.
Learning to be soft with oneself is no easy task. Learning what intimacy means both within oneself but also within others is no simple task. Being open to the intensity of an intimate moment, being able to sit with it and to take the time necessary to truly digest it is possibly one of the hardest concepts to grasp.
It was through my experience with analogue film that I began to break down these concepts for myself. As a child my life wasn’t always soft (but then again, whose is?). I grew up in a household with parents who loved and cared, and with siblings whom I struggled with and against. We weren’t a family who hugged or snuggled or talked about emotions. I grew up learning to rub dirt on the wounds, keep my chin up, and be logical. In the end it did me well in many ways, but also set me up for years of failure. I think this is a story for many of us. We fight against the waves of fragility and emotiveness of our humanity. What is the point of living if we reject this though? Money, success, prestige? It is meaningless without the capacity to love and appreciate, to be intimate with a thought or a moment or even another living being. I graduated from high school and moved into a tiny room in a tall brick building on a college campus. I took classes, met diverse people, ate food I’d never tried before, fell in love and had my heart broken. I took more art classes. I began shooting with an analogue camera and fell into a whole new form of love. This metal box with a glass lens had the capacity to take a sliver of time and freeze it. It solidified the tumultuous multifaceted filing system that was, and still is, my inspirable mind. It took that which could be best described as whispers in the wind and tethered it down into a tangible object, if an image may be construed as such. Film itself required my undying love and care. It was this that introduced me to the concept that gentleness could be as powerful as strength. It was the constant flux of failure and success with this seemingly magical material that allowed me to treat myself with the same wonder as I treated my work.
