What to keep?


Here at SUU, I have become heavily involved in the outdoor recreation community on campus. This has introduced me to an extraordinary group of people. Rock climbers, ski bums and backpackers, mountaineers and canyoneers. Many of these people live out of vans, small apartments, crash on couches, and own very few possessions. We sacrifice the material objects to get to the far reaches of the desert and high peaks of the mountains.
When beginning to minimize your possessions, the question you're told to ask yourself is “Does this bring me joy? Does it add to my life?” So with these pictures I wanted to explore why gear passed the test of what to keep. When condensing everything you own to fit into a single van, where was the line drawn? As I worked on this project, I began to see that these things were more than just things. They are tools, they open doors. Allow us to scale 100 foot walls of cliff, surf down a mountain, and survive for days in the wilderness.  
I took these pictures to show what this gear does for us, and how it becomes more than just an object. I only took pictures of objects that brought value to the people that owned them. It lead to an exploration of the object I personally own, and made me ask myself why I owned things that didn’t fit this category. We obsess over gear for a reason, because it means more than just a thing that sits on a shelf.
Each photo shows something that allows its user to do something we never could have otherwise. I focused on the gear over the user, to show what it can give us and how it is much more than an object.





















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