Happy Accidents
Living an authentic and intuitive life and building an authentic and intuitive business isn’t easy. Still, Eyoälha Baker bravely follows her passion for photography wherever it leads. This woman is in love with the art-making process. To Eyoälha, intuition and art go hand-in-hand. “Sometimes I don’t even look through my viewfinder,” she confesses. Eyoälha strives for her work to exist outside the bounds of what was created before.
Eyoälha considers herself very “worldly-knowledgable” rather than technically knowledgable. This means her work is riddled with technical “mistakes”—A word that Eyoälha embraces wholeheartedly. The beauty in her work comes from the mistakes, she says, because mistakes enrich life. “[It’s] what makes our life fascinating and interesting and fun and creative,” she says. “If we just get straight to the point, we miss all that stuff. The journey is the joy.”
Self-Actualization Through Art
It took Eyoälha nearly 20 years to call herself a photographer. She comes from a family of talented artists, and the idea of throwing her hat in the artistic ring intimidated her. Still, she dabbled in visual art through her high school’s arts program. She applied to be a photography minor in college, but she was rejected from the program.
Then, in her mid-thirties, she bought a small digital camera and went to Brazil. There, she says, “something exploded in me.” Anywhere she went, she took photos (you can see some of them here). Photography brought out a side of herself she rarely connected to. She considers herself a private, introverted person, but armed with her camera, Eyoälha was forced to talk to all kinds of people. Without photography, she never would’ve known that she loves getting to know people.
Photography is a Form of Communication!
Photography is special to Eyoälha because of its uniquely interpersonal nature. Think of every time you’ve taken a photo or had your photo taken. The process requires a certain degree of communication and vulnerability. Eyoälha loves making friends with the people she takes photos of.
Eyoälha made a lot of friends through her Jump for Joy project. She started the project because she wanted to capture the positive energy of people when they literally jump for joy. While the project was active, she reached out to people from all walks of life. “It opened and expanded me in a way that I wanted other people to get a taste of what that felt like,” she says. After a while, she outgrew the project, or, in her words, “the joy had integrated.”
The Simple Life
Eyoälha wasn’t sure what she wanted to do until she started playing with light as its own, natural, filter. She learned that she loved the ways light can make a photo feel ethereal. Then, in 2019, took a job as a property manager on Mount Shasta. In fact, Eyoälha says she had two jobs: The first being her reckoning with past heartaches and traumas. When she wasn’t helping out or confronting her past, she took experimental photos. Eyoälha calls this time a “self-directed artist residency.” She spent about a year there, where she lived in a furnished tent without a toilet or a kitchen. Fortunately, there was a kitchen nearby that she could use. Last summer, though, she took care of a different camp, where she was entirely outside. This was during the California wildfires, so the air was smokey and hot. She would have to go into the creek to cool down.
Eyoälha's work is done with minimal editing, zero filters, and through the magical wonder of sunlight!
The Pure Joy of Intuitive Art
It might look on the outside like Eyoälha makes major sacrifices to create her intuitive art. She doesn’t make a lot of money, and she spends a lot of time roughing it. Still, Eyoälha loves her life and she loves her art. She finds joy in small, absurd coincidences. One time, she hoped for a fridge full of food. Not much later, she opened a friend’s fridge to find it full of lemons. Serendipitous moments like that make Eyoälha happy. She also loves to make other people happy through her art. The goal of her work, she says, is to expand peoples’ hearts through the energy she captures in her photography. “I want other people to feel good too. I want people to play and explore in the way I’m doing because I think it’s fun,” she says. The greatest gift she’s received through her journey is her deep, abiding love for the artistic process.
Learn more about Eyoälha and her Intuitive Work
Eyoälha is a Canadian-based intuitive photographer, muralist, public speaker, writer, and community engagement activator. She is the creative behind the Jump for Joy photo project and the genre of Light Realm photography. Her images and her writing are published internationally. She incorporates energy, breathing, movement, and sunlight frequency to create otherworldly magical images. Eyoälha celebrates mistakes and lives life intuitively and gratefully. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Follow the Jump for Joy project on Instagram. You can find her other work on several Instagrams: Light Realm Photography, Light Realm Art, EclecticInspired, and FotoLogEyoalha.
