A not uncommon experience with Beccs Lee:
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At a museum or the beach or the hills just past Castaic, walking and talking. I say something. Wait for a response. Look to my right and realize that Beccs isn’t there. She is ten feet behind me, photographing someone or something or nothing at all. “Wait, what’d you say? Hold on, can you stand there for a second? Don’t look at me! Chin down! Stop laughing!”

If you knew Beccs, you knew her camera – the chunky Canon DSLR that was always slung over her left shoulder. I was always amazed that she could carry it around all day and never grow weary from it. She was too devoted to her craft to ever leave it behind. And she saw opportunity everywhere: in shoelaces and scuff marks, in the toothy, daring smile of a seven-year-old boy, in face paint and dappled light and strangers’ faces.

Rebecca had a gift, but it was one that she never took for granted. She was on the constant hunt for improvement, always looking around, always searching for what she hadn’t noticed before. She had a special eye. She saw angles and colors and expressions that most of us wouldn’t give a second glance. She taught me to see the world in all its brilliance – to revel in the details and the grandeur and the mess of it all. She poured her passionate heart into everyone and everything, and her work is evidence of that.

Beccs would have been 22 [the year this gallery was created]. She wanted to be a museum curator. Stop by, take a look around.

Happy Birthday, Beccs, the gentle observer, the most joyous audience, the curator of light.

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