William Black, Staying Awake

“Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep”

– William Blake

the arrow goes where it will go

I’ve had some pretty cool experiences in my life but this one really stands out.

A group of close friends hired me, met me out at the Salt Flats and when we got there the salt flats were flooded. Water everywhere. One of our cars got stuck, we had to get towed. We pivoted together, making something out of the unexpected- beyond original vision.

I hold the ideas that initiate a creative work very lightly. Creative results aren’t beholden to the initiations that bring them into life, anymore than we live genuinely when beholden to what our parents think we should be.

We
steady the bow
and the arrow goes
where it will go.

And that’s good enough.

stein, god, there there

God, in the form of Gertrude Stein, said “There is no there there.” What a liberating and grief laden burden joy to be a human on earth and what wonderful wonders to frankly forgive “there” and “someday” or “then” and “nostalgia” and see now, now, and now as the only, only, and only.

Client Review, Andrea Updike

“I cannot believe how uninhibited I felt shooting with Ashley. I have SO MANY issues with how I see myself and my appearance in real life AND in photos and I didn’t care about that at all during the shoot. Those concerns that feel like bricks were not even present. I had COMPLETE trust that whatever we were going to create together, I would love.

Ashley also created an EXPERIENCE that provided absolute specific intention and purpose for the shoot. This was not about taking "cute photos where I hopefully look thin to myself and others," NO, not one single ounce of that. This was about something so much more, about documenting motherhood, womanhood, and the human details of my life at this very moment with two heaping scoops of my unique style & personality - none of which is actually tangible and CAN ONLY be presented/captured by artists alike because it is ALL a matter of interpretation.

It is not even about the physical things I wore during the shoot even though I love them, they were vehicles of sorts - this was about all the feelings, emotions, and energy I described above directly associated to the true intention of the shoot.”

Thank you, Andrea. For trusting me and yourself enough to make a magic neither of us could have made alone.

COLLABORATION // A Brief Waltz in a Little Room: 23 Short Plays About Walter Eyer

My continued partnership with Sackerson is a source of deep pride and pleasure. From the actors and artists to the organizers and minds behind each production, I am urged to go deeper and tell evermore true and important stories, more honestly.

Sackerson's upcoming immersive show "A Brief Walt: 23 Short Plays About Walter Eyer" has just been announced today and tickets are available beginning August 23rd. A Brief Waltz is a thought-provoking and intimate experience with heart, story, and feeling pulsing at the heart-center of this worthy cultural story written by the brilliant Morag Shepherd Alex Ungerman Shawn Francis Saunders and Matthew Ivan Bennett.

Images and art direction by Ashley Thalman Photography
Hand painted canvas backdrop by Ultraviolet Backdrops
Actor/Character with Robert Scott Smith

Portraits with Maddie Beeton

I remember the first time I met her. The women crowded around the pine cabin table set off-center in the room. She wore a tank top. Hair pulled back, rings, earrings, jeans, whatever. The soul showed. I held back my feeling of recognition because I was the host this go around and she the attendee but, I knew I had found a friend.

Maddie Beeton is filled with insight and poetry. She is soul wise, curious, brave and adventuresome. We’ve consumed so much coffee and cried and laughed knowing they are the same thing. I like to cook for her, she likes to listen. We like to rip the world apart and put it back together again with time and the time we chose to spend together.

A few weeks after my ex-husband moved out I had a stem cell transplant in my eyes and she was there. She knew the divorce was long-coming. She had been there, she knew.

I wish every woman had the blessing of someone who had been there, and could understand. She knew the pattern that came of sobbing sorrow and the way that good memories come back for seconds, dipping into regret. She was there day after day, tending to my home, my dog, my heart, my strange and specific needs for darkness. She knew that I was recovering from a binge of bravery that only time would sort. And it’s sorted. And Maddie has been that rare friend that cheers me. She loves when I’m doing well, she foresaw a lot of the good that I’ve found and she reflects that back to me with kindness.

Maddie isn’t afraid of being in the middle of life, on the frays of the uncomfortable, uncommon, or wild. We go together like that. She is one of the most dear people to me and I love her without end.

I photographed Maddie at Ultraviolet Studios and we followed the session up with food and talking about aliens and the soul. As we do. You can find Maddie and her adventures on Instagram at @madelinebeeton and at her website HERE.

Seen- Nursing Portraits

Only a few days after giving birth, shirt stained with mother’s milk as she lives and breaths the new life from inside to outside her.

This is one of the myriad ways motherhood takes and gives and changes shape. A peek into the world of motherhood, of the fourth trimester, of the hazy days so precious and heavy and fast.

This is a phase, a phrase, a holy blip of a consequential ritual with tethers that bind us from ancestor to far-flung successors.

Thank you Stephanie for letting me see and share.

Photo of Stephanie Hawkes. Find Stephanie HERE

Canvas backdrops by Ultraviolet Backdrops

Portraits with Errin Julkunen Pedersen

Errin and I have created beautiful love story that involves a cast of colleges, children, poets, parents, bishops, prophets, and partners. It is a story set in early morning apartments with positive pregnancy tests, late afternoon hikes in rocky canyons, memorable and terrible concerts and their crowds, drinks and laughter, sobbing seriousness, pomogranates in post op, churches filled with hymns.

How can you measure the depth of a decade long sisterhood where honesty, fear, triumph, career, motherhood, partnership, divorce, dancing and indelible encouragement has cheered you both on? You receive the gift, you witness it mature.

Last month as part of my Portrait Woman:: Mother event I hosted Errin as my honorary mother at my space, Ultraviolet Studios. This session gave me an intimate and new vision of a woman I already know so well. I know her goodness. I know her fear. I know her aims but mostly, I know her work. I know the texture of a life she has decided. I have witnessed her move from a university mainstay to a tenured and widely appreciated professional, from a wanting mother to a seasoned one, from wise to wiser.

There are few people in this world who carry poetics and purpose into the soul like she does. She is deeply moral, hysterically witty, and is smarter than any mother fucker in any room, and by god- the most stylish.

Errin recently shared the following regarding her work, to both understand and become increasingly empowered, by her journey with bipolar disorder. It’s this kind of openness with encouragement that Errin does so perfectly.

“You will think you can do it all. You will be wrong. You will try so hard and fail miserably. You will lose your shit when you can’t control everything. Your greatest challenge will be recognizing that you don’t control anything. You will punch things until your hands bleed, trying to find some respite. You’ll feel like a shitty mom, a bad friend, a failing spouse, and worse. But. You’ll remember. That it passes. That every bad thing as much as every good thing brought you to where you are. That no matter where you are, it’s where you are supposed to be. I’m always trying to remember.”

Like attracts like, our matches in soul and system find and refine us. Whatever goodness I hold that pulled this brilliant woman and me together in this incarnation makes both of us lucky indeed. I love you Errin sister.

You can find Errin on Instagram at @incrediblejulk

Hand painted backdrops by Ultraviolet Backdrops

Errin Julkunen Pedersen photographed by Ashley Thalman at Ultraviolet Studios Utah.

To the "Too Much" Woman

What hides away when we show one side?

What parts have we divorced, and where did those parts go?

What does it mean to make a welcome home for self, after we sent her away?

Where does she wait until we’re ready?

Woman, you do not fit into narrow prescriptions.

You are an endless landscape, an ecosystem entire of light and dark, rot and flowering.

You are the seed breaking forth, angry and determined.

You are the dark soil parting and nourishing.

You are the gift that the world called forth, you are whole and holy, you don’t need what you don’t already have.

You are sprout and root, stem and leaf, not a mere flowering part.

You are all the death that hides and the life that brings you back, again and again.

This is the true story of woman.

Muse Magic Music // Bad Girls- M.I.A.

Airportraits with Mo Amer

It was an October Monday in the quiet Edmonton airport where I met Mo. It was a chanced meeting and, like foreordained companions, we passed through TSA, through the sad terminal architecture, through the heavy-handed duty free gift shop- as a pair.

Taking cues from time and place, we chose a corner where the light was right, a place to talk and share. In that place we were seen and we saw each other. The truth is that Mo blessed me by being seen and showing up like he did. Connection, kindness, consideration, and fantastic light is all around us. And Mo, he’s experienced, artistic, deep, and funny. It has been so amazing in the last year and a half to see and watch Mo’s light and depth shine in a world that needs his voice, needs his generosity and humor.

I'll Be Damned

My daughter took this photo of me at Andi Pitcher’s cabin. No bra, lounging around, yesterday’s makeup, wild hair. It was a lazy morning, the kind that I’ve given myself permission to have. The sun was so warm there. Dotter raised the camera and I had a choice to make. I could have silently protested the portrait by letting her take it overexposed or by shewing her away, “Not until I’m dressed” or “No, let me take some of you.” But I didn’t, I set her exposure and let her see me.

My daughter is 10, the age so many of us began to pull at our skin, to notice lines in the abdomen when twisting, the way thighs pucker, the way we didn’t measure “right”. We inherited this from the work not done before us and I’ll be damned. I’ll be damned to be another woman pulling at puckers and hating my body, demonstrating this for my children and friends. I will not pass this on. I will let her take the photo and I will take hers, and yours, and again and again.

Muse Magic Music "Feels Like a Curse" by Lucius

Call and Response

I have felt the calling from something deep and wild inside of me from childhood. If I look back at my first real photo session which was made in a classroom at Provo high with Milmaliisa Loeskow as my subject, I can see that I was always coming back to this. I don’t know about you, but everything I wanted and valued deeply in the discovering years of high school are still the very things that I love and want. I don’t think we really change all that much in life, rather we return to ourselves if we are lucky enough and brave enough to do it.

I believe that we each feel a life-long series of magnetic aches, a train at night shaking the walls, a buzz that signals us. The volume of my signal has increased exponentially since opening Ultraviolet. Through conversation, songs, posts, books, texts, sex. I’ve been connecting and returning to myself through these dots, these crumbs.

”Do what you know.” - An early morning whisper while laying in Andi’s cabin.

“You set your intention and go.”- Errin

”Niches bring riches” from Amanda at A.&.Co

“Go with your gut.” From “Backdrop Stock”’s instagram story.

“We cannot see you. Who are you?”- D’Arcy Bennincosa

And lastly, “women women women”- like a spell that rose from what I could see. I scrolled through my Instagram feed and asked myself what messages I was visually sharing with my followers. I visited my website, a collection of my own decade-long work and I saw it- it’s always women. Women sit at the center of everything I see, every story I tell. And creative women are the heart of my very best work.

Creative women are the clients I would shoot with pleasure and excitement if I were fantastically rich and had no need for money.

The dots began to connect, igniting me with the tears and laughter of finally finding something. This is demanding as much as it is exciting. I have to change everything from pricing sheets to marketing to, everything else. But I’ve been reunited with an old friend in myself. The friend that reminds me that I deserve to do the things that make me lose track of time, that spill my heart over with excitement.

Photography is work and I know how to work. I know how to risk, I know about time and writing and pricing. I know how to show up, communicate, make, deliver, invest in my gear, network, write and collect reviews. I know. I know and I can do it over and over.

Yesterday during my tarot reading with Zina Bennion she told a story of her father, Joe Bennion, a legendary potter who once-upon-a-time made a bowl that he could reproduce over and over and over. It sold, it was beautiful and valuable and he was becoming known for the shape and glaze of his palatable offering, but one day he realized that the latest batch readied from the kill/kiln had been sitting for days unseen. No spark, no excitement no drive to decend to the basement and see. So he stopped there to return to, or to find the things that ignited him- the work that got his fingers hot.

In the upheaval of the last few years of my divorce, extreme haircuts, hard and long runs, surgeries, resigning from my formerly beloved religion, selling my house, finding the love of my life, partnering with him, learning self-love, becoming a mother and again a bonus adult to two children, taking 3 van loads of old things to the thrift store after sitting with old life relics and my drawing attachments. A year of sifting through my old mission stuff in bins, letting go of friendships, throwing away journals, changing schools, building and opening a new studio- I’ve learned this: my magic is found in doing the unknown, unreserved thing that calls, that has always called. “Do what you know” is the best and most honest thing. A depth living comes alive in the space of responding to what calls us. Clarissa Pinkola Estés said,

“If we were to name only one thing that makes the Wild Woman what she is it would be her responsiveness. The word response comes from the Latin word, “to pledge, to promise” and that is her strong suit. Her perception and deft responses are a consistent promise and pledge to the creative forces.”

I have been patient in waiting to hear the magnet call clarify. I hear it now and I’m responding to it. Steve Jobs said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

I knew Ultraviolet was a piece of my story but I didn’t know exactly how it would spark me, heal me, break me down, and require literally every dime, every piece of energy, every tear and every bit of moisture from my hands. I’ve been through weird emotional hell with it. But I knew that it would be part of my story- I just didn’t know what part. And now a piece of that has been illuminated, the call is clear.

My work is to collaborate with strong women who have a distinct artistic voice. Women who are ready to be seen, who make a wild go of their lives, who are drawn to honest images, women who share their nuanced stories. My work is to make those images with women who have heard the call to share their soul’s work like I have heard mine.

Taken by my sister, Shawna on the highest peak of Antelope Island.

Portraits with Erika Eddington

I have been photographing Erika for seven years. I have images of her hunched over a table, fiddling with petals in her early 20’s with old-soul fashion. She wore a striking white lace top tucked into something perfect.

Once we images of her precariously teetering on a wooden ladder while wearing woven wedges. Sweaty and determined we set a scene in an overgrown field, both of us pushing away stalky sunflowers, hoping the ladder would hold. We needed her high, we needed her caught in the late fertile light of September. Like yesterday I see her straw hat angled in picturesque style on her curl-topped head, surrounded by sunflowers.

We made photos on her wedding day, standing on a carpet of summer grass with perfect Claudia Dell contrapposto. She wore a classic cream dress, a peach in hand, wearing a bemused smile.

I have behind the scenes images from my Provo studio where she arranged flowers to top my Dotter’s tiny head and later atop Carol Lambert’s elderly one.

Mrs Lambert’s granddaughter hired me to photograph her purple-obsessed grandmother and I hired Erika to make floral crowns. We worked together to make images that captured Carol in her aged glory; crone, mother, maiden, girl- all the parts of a woman there and gone, rising to old age in the white-haired woman who sat regal, in flowers. Carol died a few days after that session of royal purple and flowers. We caught that image just in time.

As women and creatives, Erika and I have seen things, life has intersected over us and we’ve witnessed it together and apart; a confluence of witnessing and documenting, sharing and showing.

Erika has allowed me to chronicle her majestic life unfolding; here a little, there a little while mine unfolded unseen behind the camera. Totally comfortable and trusting, our relationship has always been fed by apertures and flowers. Each time we’ve worked together we basked, created and remembered while I attempted to understand the ethereal spaciousness of the archetypal woman in myself, in her, in Carol, in us all.

And so it is.

Here are some images from last Spring when we celebrated Erika. I hope to make photos like this again.

And so it shall be.