Some ideas arrive slowly. Others appear all at once.
Last November, I spent several days in Amsterdam wandering museums and exploring the city. A visit to the Van Gogh Museum left me creatively recharged, and ideas started flowing faster than I could process them. Rather than chasing each one, I simply opened the Notes app on my phone and wrote them down.
One note read:
Photograph Post-it Notes.
I didn't know exactly what it would become, but I knew there was something there worth exploring. As I developed the concept, the image revealed itself almost fully formed. Inspired by Cubist art, I imagined a woman climbing toward her dreams across a staircase of shifting squares, each step another obstacle, never quite lining up to create an easy path.
To build the piece, I photographed about thirty Post-it Notes arranged on a wall, then photographed my model in a pose that closely matched the vision already in my head. We made only slight variations, since the composition was already there. Over the next two weeks, I reconstructed everything in Photoshop, placing each piece onto its own square. As the number of layers grew, so did the complexity. More than once, the project became almost as difficult to navigate as the climb I was trying to portray. Looking back, that feels fitting. The image became a metaphor not only for reaching our goals, but for the creative process itself.
When I finally finished The Climb, I experienced one of those rare moments every artist hopes for: the finished piece looked almost exactly like the one I had imagined months earlier while walking through Amsterdam. I entered it into the Professional Photographers of America's Merit Image Review, where it received Imaging Excellence, placing it among the year's best photographic works.
While I'm grateful for that recognition, the real reward was something else entirely: a simple note in my phone had become exactly what I hoped it could be.
My hope is that when someone spends a few moments with The Climb, they see more than a woman ascending a staircase. I hope they recognize a little of their own journey. We all have dreams worth pursuing, and we all encounter obstacles that shift beneath our feet.
The climb is never easy. But that's what makes reaching for the next step worthwhile.
