The girl behind the camera · but also in front

I only wanted
to be someone.

I was sixteen when I asked my mother to sign me up for modeling school. Neither of us really knew what I was asking for. I only knew I wanted to be that girl on the shirt. The face on the poster. The one whose name you never learn, but whose face you swear you've seen somewhere before.

a moment that lingers

Her story

Eleanora in a delicate lace bralette and a wide-brimmed vintage hat, gazing steadily into the lens

the turn

I had cancer young. Too young to really have the words for it. It left something in me. A permanent tilt to the way I see.

Because when you brush up against the end that early, you can't un-know it. How much beauty is everywhere, all the time. How carelessly we let it slip past us. We spend our lives looking the other way, chasing the shiny, forgettable things, numbing the parts that ache instead of feeling them all the way through.

Once you stop running, you finally start to see.

So now I collect it. All of it. On purpose.

Eleanora reclining on a broad mossy rock with a waterfall spilling behind her into a dark pool

the light

The dark moves through you, the way everything does, and out the other side. What it leaves behind is light.

Or maybe just the eyes to finally find it. Now I chase it everywhere. Golden hour on the water. The current of a river over stone. The way energy moves through a morning, through a body, through a stranger's garden. I feel all of it now, louder than I used to.

Every day is an open door. I don't walk past anymore.

Eleanora among sunlit tropical foliage, dappled light falling across her face and shoulders

the leaving

That's why I go. Why I keep leaving.

I go looking for the parts of the world I haven't met yet. I want to stand somewhere I've never been, in a language I don't speak, and feel how small it makes me. How awake. The world runs on two speeds: chaos, which it calls living, and complacency, which it calls comfort. Both keep you from feeling much of anything at all.

I don't travel to collect places. I travel to let them get into me.

I'm chasing the third thing. A single ripe fig. A warm afternoon. A stranger who waves you into their doorway like they've known you for years. So I keep going out to look for it. And I bring back what I find.

An old-world stone town perched on cliffs above a cove of clear turquoise water under a wide summer sky

the search

And under all of it, I'm searching.

For the place that feels familiar the moment I arrive. The one I've somehow lived a thousand times before. The one my body knows before my mind does, and calls home. I think I'll know it by the way it makes my heart go quiet and happy. By the way I finally stop looking.

I haven't found it yet. Until then, I travel.

Eleanora seated sideways in a whimsical strawberry-shaped chair, glancing back over her hand

the invitation

So. Here's my invitation. Come with me.

There's so much that never makes it to the grid, and this is where it lives. The shoots I don't post. The parts I don't show just anyone. And it never comes to you bare. It always comes with a story. Who I really am.

Unfiltered. Unbothered. Unapologetic.

I know exactly what I am. Confident. Bold. Too much for some people, and completely at peace with that. I follow my own path, and I keep the ones who want to walk it beside me. If you don't? Close your eyes. Turn around. Walk the other way.

Eleanora reclining in a soft magazine-style editorial portrait, meeting the camera

come find me

But if you've stayed with me this long, I think you already understand.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot that a story is a kind of spell. So I'm gathering mine back up, the places, the moments, the beautiful strange magic of it all, and giving them somewhere to live. A whole little world, told one picture at a time. Why don't you tag along?

x, Eleanora

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