Jennilee Marigomen, Photographer

Vancouver, British Columbia
Interview by Sheila Lam
Photographs by Donnel Garcia

There is a moment, in the early morning and late afternoon, when Vancouver's light does something brilliant. The cloud cover thins just enough, and the city's diffused glow sharpens for a few seconds into something glistening. For most people, it passes unnoticed. For Jennilee Marigomen, it is the whole point.

Jennilee came to photography by accident. Her education arrived through the informal, abundant world of Tumblr and Flickr, where artists taught each other by proximity and curiosity. She describes her early practice as self-initiated, shaped by instinct rather than a predetermined path. Looking at her work now, this origin feels inseparable from its visual language: images that seem less composed than caught, as if the photographer merely happened to be standing in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment, unhurried and expectant.

Yet, every frame of Jennilee's work is carved out of the infinite flow of the visible with intention. They are a deliberate act of attention that transforms a scene into a statement. "The extraordinary is already embedded in the everyday—it just requires a certain kind of attention," she says. "I’m interested in those small shifts in light, gesture, color, or atmosphere that can transform something familiar into something slightly phenomenal or emotionally charged." It is not a matter of finding it. It is a matter of learning how to look.

That learning, for her, is inseparable from Vancouver itself. The city has made her eyes. She speaks of its softness, blurred edges, muted tones, a pervasive sense of watery distance, and of the hunger for light that a rainforest climate produces. When the sun arrives here, you relish it. Growing up beside water, she has developed what she calls a pull toward it, a gravitational force. "I find myself returning to it often ... following the same paths, tracing the edge where the city meets the water," she explains. "It becomes less about destination and more about being near it and all its complexities. I’m drawn to its sparkle, life, beauty, mystery, and darkness."

This is where her practice becomes philosophy. Familiarity, she argues, is not the enemy of vision. The repetition of the known route is precisely what allows new things to surface. She has made running a kind of method: the same path, the same landmarks, but never the same experience. The light has moved. The vegetation has shifted with the season. Her own mood, pace, and attention are all in flux, and the landscape responds accordingly. "I think that repetition, paired with that openness, keeps things from settling into something static. The familiar stays in motion—kind of like people," she says.

There is something quietly radical in this. Seeing, as John Berger reminds us, is never simply a matter of receiving. To look is an act of choice, one that brings the visible world within our reach and situates us in relation to it. The assumption that we see something simply because it is in front of us—that seeing is passive, automatic, neutral—is one that Jennilee's photographs undo with every frame. Looking is active. It is, as she puts it, how she processes the world, how she organizes its chaos into something she can hold. The eye, for Jennilee, is never off duty. She is almost always framing, noticing a relationship between objects.

What this means for her life outside photography is that, in a sense, there is no outside. The same attention that governs her work governs her walks, her runs, her time in nature, and her way of moving through a crowded room. Ikebana. Films. Fashion. Long hikes. Conversations that stay with her for days. Everything, she says, gathers slowly and finds its way back. The image-making is continuous; only the camera is sometimes put away.

Her photographs are not documents of the spectacular. They are invitations to a certain kind of attentiveness, evidence that the visible world is richer, stranger, and more alive than we tend to believe when we stop looking. To spend time with her work is to feel, briefly, what it might be like to see without the habit of not seeing. The light is already there. It has been there all along. You only have to look.●