Yesterday I launched my new website alongside the sale of two new sets of postcard prints. Each set comes with 5 different postcards, with the classic back: room for a letter, stamp and address. They are $10 for a set, plus a small amount for shipping. If you buy one today, it will ship today, hopefully in time for the holidays!
I wanted to take a moment and write about some photos that appear on my website. In the last weeks I have gone through every photo I’ve ever taken – I wish I could tell you how many there are. Thousands and thousands and thousands. Narrowing them down was not an easy task, and there are many that didn’t make the cut. I hope you can spend some time sifting through the images that did. There are so many little stories that pair with the images, so I’ll leave you with a few.
It’s June in Northern California. I’m on my first tour and it’s exhausting. There’s not a single night off and in a few hours we are playing to twelve people in Arcata. The light is perfect, one of those rare days you shoot an entire roll of film within a few hours. We head out for a walk before the show, and I come across this heron. I love to photograph birds, but a white heron is a rare and special sight. I follow it around, sneaking up on it to take this photo. This image instills such a profound sense of calm in me. I keep it close by to remind me that such moments are possible to find.
The first time I went to Poland there was the most intense heatwave I’ve experienced to this day. A dry heat that pulled the sweat from your body and had everyone deliriously walking around trying to find shade. I was at a music festival, one of the ones where everyone camps. There was no iced coffee, and I remember drinking hot coffee on the hottest day with the hope it would cool me down. The line-up for the showers was a mile long, but we managed to find the local watering hole not far away, and this is where that photo was taken.
It’s very cloudy but still warm on the day I take this photo. The water is a deep grey and there’s rain on the way. It’s the second to last weekend of the summer. It’s so quiet. We have the entire lake to ourselves.
This one was taken on the train between Manchester and Southport in June of 2012. I don’t often take photos of strangers, but when I do it’s usually their backs, or their eyes are closed. In this moment I wanted to know everything about this man. I still do.
Another heatwave moment – such extremities tend to be more visceral... It’s July 2015 and Alexandra and I are staying at Erin’s apartment in a fifth floor bedroom with no air conditioning. It is so hot and we lie next to each other in a double bed in only our underwear, wondering what someone would think if they walked in. The next night, Mega Bog plays a set in the living room, and after that we all hang out on the roof. In the distance you can see the skyline.
Not all of my photos have stories but these were a few that stood out to me today. Postcards in their own way I suppose.
View my new website here + find the postcard sets here. Next time I’ll have some music news for you…
xx tess
You can find Tess Roby on Instagram, Twitter, Spotify, and Bandcamp.