Baby Elephant. Medium: Fuzz.

Madeline Donald

I would, I told myself, walk regularly in and with the riparian habitats of the Okanagan and Similkameen watersheds for one year, sharing encounters with the myriad beings who people the riparian assemblage. In these encounters I am a novice noticer. The riparian peoples instruct my noticing through iterative solicitations of my attention: a flower over here, a crumpled leaf over there. Then I take a photograph. Once I return home from a walk I choose, caption, and post photos, first on Instagram, and at the end of each month, on a wiki page housed on the Open Science Framework.

Soon after beginning this practice, I began to realize this photojournal was more than linear. Captions of photos, like the one you see here, would pop into my head in either a similar encounter or seemingly unrelated happenstance. Cycling by this same species of plant, my brain would holler, “Baby elephant. Medium: fuzz.” Suddenly I’d be drawn back into the weather and location with which this photo was taken; a photo-caption unit reaching through time and medium to grab my attention, again. Each unit became a ministory, drawing and building on multifarious sensory experiences to anchor momentary encounter.