The next chapter.
Annecy in the early morning March light. Spring-like and glorious.
It is March 14, 2026 and I am writing to you while winter has once again returned to the French Alps, as I sit (or really lay horizontally) on my chartreuse colored second-hand sofa that I love to pieces as the rain drills on outside. It’s snowing in the mountains, again, and I don’t take a single day of snow for granted one bit. But honestly, I am still recovering from the many long and cold Montana winter’s endured. Years of living through weather that ultimately, I was not made for, but deeply admired for its uniqueness, harshness, and beauty. Thankfully though, spring is arriving in France and with it longer days and more sunshine, as well as the highly anticipated cherry blossom tree blooms. A moment that I have been anxiously awaiting for exactly one year!
On this particularly stormy weekend I decided it was a good time to dive into the monumental task of moving my website to a new host platform. After many years spent on Pixieset I have returned to Squarespace - with a more intuitive blog set-up that allows you, the reader, the freedom to join and participate in this little corner of the internet without algorithms, paywalls, or feed timelines. This isn’t going to be ‘content’ smashed up in-between AI generated ad’s. Which by the way, I despise the word content. No, this is the next chapter of my existence in this [inescapable] digital world.
After deep thought and consideration, I decided to move my work away from Substack, and am in the current process of moving away from Instagram (turns out archiving 370-plus posts from over 7 years is a hefty task). I am not here to remind you how bad social media is for you, we all are aware of that. But after some very good years on Instagram, the ‘enshitification’ has taken over in full force, and today the negatives far outweigh the positives. A place where I once did love sharing and communicating with other’s, where I have been introduced to so many incredible creatives and artists - is now only a place that robs me of my creative process as a whole. That along with many other concerns I’ve had in regard to the ever-so rapidly changing digital landscape - and the rather unsettling feeling of not ‘owning’ the work, the photos, the words I was willingly handing over to the Meta empire for free to further inform their AI models only for it to then be used against me. This all has naturally only given me a more extreme feeling of ick over time, and I think rightfully so. SO with that, I do believe that these are the next very best steps that I can take to protect myself as an artist.
What the future looks like here? This is not content, this is life. Art as lived experience, life as art. I currently do not have any plans to paywall my work, but I might in the future. Who knows, we will see where this thing goes. I do plan to share blog posts in an email newsletter format but honestly, it will be pretty infrequent. I do plan to potentially dabble in some light vlog type video posts. I will never ever run ad’s on this website. If you ever see an ad - please notify me of it immediately. I am currently building out various online gallery experiences to be viewed in a pseudo-magazine style. Art to be viewed and indulged - not consumed and ‘liked’. I don’t want your likes. Commenting is not required, but if you feel so inclined to - I will respect it and be quite happy to engage in some online discourse with you. You can now even create a profile on my website, I think that’s pretty neat! All photography, videography, and words you view here are my own ORIGINAL work with zero use of AI. I stand firmly firmly firmly against AI generated art. I believe that if you put yourself out there as an artist, the right people will find you. I have a curated list of artist’s/writer’s/etc who all have website’s just like this one that I keep up with. I love the idea of a personal website as a return to the nostalgia of the early day’s of the internet. I love that you can still discover inspiration online without the noise that is advertisements and Instagram reels getting in the way. And in today’s wild digital frontier, it is more important than ever that the creatives band together.
Sometimes I wonder why every way of living that I am passionate about is somehow on the brink of dying - the notion that ‘this is a dying breed’ kinda lifestyle but applied to my entire life. It goes for aviation, sailing, photography, living in cohesion with the wilderness, and even being a ParrotHead. With each year as the technology rapidly rewrites the way we live, the things that I love the most get left in the dust, industries changed, wild places stomped on, people left behind, old school values forgotten. I’ve never felt more like a pirate than now, seeking out a life of adventure, going rogue against the system’s that exist to only trap us. Except my pirate adventures are just my desire to live a {in all reality} simple life experiencing freedom in the outdoors. To put it plainly, it fucking sucks.
But onward I will march. On the contrary, life in France land is anything but sucky!
After the storm, a standard winter day in Annecy looks something like this.
The winter sign off.
Our first winter in the French Alps - it was a season of plentiful powder days, a daily free coffee at the ski mountain, and consuming probably too much tartiflette.
The Venetian Carnival, in the Annecy old-town. A tradition of mysterious masquerading that occurs near the end of winter, and is quite the tourist attraction.
If you told me ten years ago that I would be spending my days in the shadow of Mont Blanc and (as of late) casually speaking French with my husband then I would have said “OK, yeah right”. Because even today, I can still hardly believe this is how we spend our time now. I think this goes to show that we truly do hold ourselves back the most, as previously I have always said “oh I am not good at language, I was never good at that”, blah blah blah, but then I stopped making excuses and started doing it - and now my accent sounds pretty dang good sometimes. Who knew Casey and I would be dissecting French grammar together while sipping on local wine in the cozy kitchen of our quaint French apartment, as the alpen glow casts itself over the rocky cliffs visible from our window. If it sounds kind of dreamy, it’s because it actually is. Actually it’s super dreamy, and I absolutely love it. There are these two unique and heavy wooden cabinet doors built into the tile counters of our kitchen that we call ‘the trap doors’, like that of which one might find in a medieval fortress, which fits - because we now live in a medieval town. The quirks and character of these old buildings never cease to amaze me, even if most the cabinets only lead to some dark void probably filled with spiders that goes who knows where. I love it. I am still being humbled every time I leave the apartment, and go grocery shopping. Purchasing fruits and vegetables that I still am unable to properly pronounce, tasting unique ingredients, and cooking entirely new meals - that I honestly never thought I would like, but turns out, I do.! We listen to all the birds sing and bumblebees buzz through our half-opened heavy wood-framed windows, while the daffodils, crocus, and tulips each take their turn blooming. I never knew I wanted to live in a world where it’s considered normal to call ‘bonjour’ out the open window to a total stranger as they pass by, but here I am doing exactly that, and now I can’t imagine life being lived any other way.
For 120 days and counting now, I have been a student of the French culture - utilizing every moment available to notice and observe, and in that process, I have become molded in ways that even I am unaware of. I ~ of course ~ anticipated changes to occur, as one would be a complete fool to think that barreling down a path such as this would not totally reform their ideas of life and living as a whole. But exactly what changes and when? That cannot be predicted, and will only be known with experience. However one fact for sure is that life is very different now, and so are we. In my constant partaking of what is really considered one of the favorite pastimes of the French, people watching and doing nothing - I feel as though I have solved all of the issues in which my old life was deeply plagued with in five words.
Life here is so offline.
It was a sunny November afternoon, not long after our arrival into Annecy, and we found ourselves wandering down the very street that we now very gratefully call our home - it was around 5:00pm and town was lively, as it usually is. As we headed down the sidewalk passing beautiful gated courtyards of apartment buildings, a young family was coming towards us in the opposite direction. Two little kids raced ahead on scooters, as the mid 30’s-ish mother and father ran after them, all smiling, all dressed (bien sûr) with incredible style, and not a smartphone in sight. I thought to myself that they seemed so genuinely happy, and then continued to ponder if this was a one-time occurrence. But now, after hundreds of hours of observing I can honestly say that I witness this every single day, dozens of times, over and over again, exactly like that.
I again live in a world where kids play outside together and don’t have iPads and screens at the dinner table. Where I can sit in a public space and observe more people truly enjoying themselves than utilizing their phones. Where restaurant tables aren’t filled with the lights of phone screen. Where couples of all ages walk hand-in-hand without hurry, simply enjoying themselves. Where people look you directly in the eyes the entire time while speaking. Where parents play with their kids at the playground instead of stand off to the side to take a work call. Where I frequently see chic old women toting around their basic flip phones. Where a culture of moderation with a sincere emphasis on quality time is more important than your job - and in so many more ways than just your average Sunday when everything is closed down so that the people can go enjoy the outdoors and green spaces with friends and family. No, this goes much deeper.
Mountains towering above the iconic pastel buildings of the old town, I am sure they are only becoming more crooked with time.
I love to wander or ‘flâner’ through here in the mornings with my camera :)
The other day, after our French language class, on a particularly cloudy and chilly week day, my husband and I meandered through the cobblestone streets of the old town, in search of a spot for lunch. With no shortage of options and all the time, we landed on a small corner burger joint situated across from an outdoor free library that was built into the side of a flower bed. We watched as people of all ages would walk on by, pausing to open the little individual library box doors, carefully inspecting the books and flipping pages, before selecting one and carrying on with their day. But this wasn't the behavior for any specific occasion, Holiday, or time of day - it’s simply 2:00pm on a Thursday in France, and I bet you they’ll do it again tomorrow. No wonder the French language has so many different words to describe the simple act of ‘walking’.
Three weeks ago, we sat in the office of our new Veterinarian. Her desk stacked with notebooks and folders of documents, tape dispensers, scissors, and cups of pens. We watched as she meticulously used scotch tape to adhere the numbers of our cats rabies vaccination batch onto a little homemade stamp that she then affixed to a page in a small notebook which would become the new official record keeper of Sushi’s medical history here in France. As she sent us out the door with the little records book and an ‘au revoir’, I smiled to myself at how non-digital the entire process was. Later on that day we found ourselves at the local public library - packed to the brim with not a chair or table open to spare. We walked around the building in complete awe, as people from aged from 8 to 80 lounged in chairs, sofas and even laid on the floor passing the time bending back the pages of books and filling notebooks with writing - not a smartphone in sight. Life in France isn’t analog living for a trend, it simply just still is.
Still to this day, I have never seen so many Sunday newspapers purchased in my life! And I even worked in the newspaper industry for a minute. Each and every Sunday you can find people picking up the Sunday paper along with their viennoiserie(s) at the local boulangerie. It is very common to pass by someone walking en route to the park or wherever with their newspaper folded and coffee in hand, and dressed to the nine’s of course - this is France we are talking about. How incredible!
Coupled with the offline living here, exists a supreme right to privacy that is equally respected by everyone. I first noticed this after I received some negative reactions from others when they saw I had a camera in hand while in a public space. I also have noticed that if you are standing on the sidewalk holding a phone, people will avoid you and react uncomfortably to you. For me, this has called for remaining incredibly aware when practicing photography, and learning from the methods of other photographers I observe while out and about. But there is really such a nice feeling in knowing that while going on a walk, you aren’t just setting off the Ring cameras when passing by every house. Because they don’t have them! This way of living has rubbed off on me rather quickly - in a fulfilling way that I didn’t know if it were possible for a place like this to still exist. As if the nostalgic aches I have held for so so long for a slower life have all been answered by the fact that I just desperately needed a new culture. One where I am not required to fight against a relentless system to achieve the life I dreamt of! One where everyone has already been living exactly in the way that I had long desired! Reaffirming the idea that we indeed did choose France for specific reasons, and that all the hard work to get here has been beyond validated. And, to witness all of this in action with my own two eyes… well, that has felt like one very long and continuous therapy session. Whew. Maybe a topic for another time.
Anyways, I think I am going to put together a short cinematic video of sorts showcasing some bits of spring here, what do you think? This might be a good time to let you know that I do have a Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@alexsaadphotophoto - but will embed any videos I post there on this site as well.
Along with my constant observing of the French culture, I am too dissecting how the French people all have such incredible hair. And I am talking about everyone, literally everyone - little kids, the teens, women in their 20-30’s, men in their late 40’s, and of course the old folks with their classic style. From long flowing locks to perfect curls with no evidence of hot tools used, to piecey bangs, NO hairspray, soft and bouncy, textured but smooth, not a hair out of place, and all with gorgeous natural color. We all know they are the originators of the messy but thoughtfully curated look, but even then - how is this achieved on such a consistent basis day in and day out. It is IMPRESSIVE. Hello to my French readers, HOW do you all do this??
Thank you immensely for being here. Please enjoy some other moments from this winter in the Haute-Savoie captured on the Ricoh GRIII, displayed below.
See you next time!
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