I should go to jail for being so sentimental
A very long chat with Ava Williams on visual storytelling, capturing youth, and time moving fast and slow.
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I can’t quite remember how I came across
. It might have been a cute outfit video on my Discover page on Instagram, but it was more likely the Wes Anderson-inspired TikTok she made that kicked off quite the global trend last year. Either way, I’ve stuck around for the ride and become very fond of how she tells stories about life and being young using snippets from all corners of culture to show the world how she feels.I loved this very chatty chat we had which seems to have covered every possible base, from visual research and her work as a photographer to being a twin, revisiting old diaries, capturing youth and nostalgia simultaneously, time moving fast and slow, and a nice little tangent about Pride and Prejudice. It’s a long one, but even after I stopped recording we kept on talking because there was just so much to say. The best kind of first conversation to have with a new friend, don’t you think?
At the end of the interview, paid subscribers will be treated to a comprehensive list of the media that made Ava who she is, so if you’d like to dip your toe into that, you can upgrade to paid here — there’s a 7-day free trial!
As always, this conversation has been edited for clarity and length (which might be surprising because it’s still bloody long).
I mostly start by asking people who they are, but my friend Britt who I interviewed the other day did this really nicely so I want to keep it going — she started by describing herself without saying what she does, so maybe say who you are and then we can come onto your job afterwards.
Let me see if I can do this without giving away what I do. I am Ava Williams, I am someone who is particularly interested in my very mundane life and sort of exploring the normal aspects of being a human. I greatly enjoy all aspects of life, including the hard times in hindsight and the very normal things like going to a bookstore, all the small things that I feel like in the past I might have taken for granted.
I try to be a very present person. One of my favourite things is getting a Margarita at every bar I go to. I am a person who is not going to adjust myself to fit into a space, the space is going to adjust to fit me and although there are times when I can feel very insecure, I’m not saying I am immune to that whole thing, I try to remind myself that being myself is the best person to put forward, and so I don’t often adjust any opinion or who I am or how I dress.
I really like fashion so I’m always dressing very colourfully, I’m always wearing the wrong thing, the wrong shoes, and never doing anything in a very logical way although I am a very logical person. I look at life as something that I have to make my own as opposed to just getting through it.
That was so good! It really got to the essence of Ava rather than just your ordinary labels. You got to the crux of it.
It’s a very good question, you should keep that going.
I think I will because so often people say, “I’m an X” and they put themselves in a little box, and I am like, “You are so much more than that!”
I know, I always say that I am multi-hyphenated, and not in the Alexa Chung way, but in the “just trying to figure it all out” way.
Yes, right! And now getting onto the job, what do you do?
I’m a photographer and retoucher. I went to school for photography from 2015 to 2019, and then when I graduated I started retouching for one of my professors which is how I learned to be a working photographer because now I know how to make the images look the way I want. Not that I didn’t learn that in school — I learnt from my professor who taught me everything I knew.
Then I struggle with the content creation part because I don’t know if I’m a standard content creator — My friends and I have this thing where we say there are three sections on the internet and it’s like three circles of a Venn diagram and you usually occupy a middle ground. There’s a Curator, a Creator, and an Influencer, and I tend to be in the Curator/Creator category, mostly because I’m almost begging people to not do what I do.
Right, exactly, and the word influencer I find a little icky.
Yeah, my friend asked me recently if I was insulted when people call me an influencer, and I said not really, but it’s also not my favourite term to be referred to as. I don’t think content creator is any better, it’s sort of like an influencer who went to art school. I am almost like an internet personality, that’s my preferred term even though I’m definitely not an internet personality in the way people think.
The way that I’ve familiarised myself with your work is that I mostly just follow you on Instagram and you do these great vlogs — or anti-vlogs, as you call them. I’m always so happy when one of them comes out because they are just quite different to anything I’ve seen anybody else doing. What I particularly like about them is the way you gather all of these different snippets and references from around, not even just the internet, but film, books, music, and editorial photography, I feel like I see a lot of Vivian Meyer in there. You kind of amalgamate all these great references and turn them into such a personal three-minute video, or however long it is, and I just wonder how you started doing that, what was the thinking behind it, and how do you find those references and pull them together?
I actually just got a message from someone who was saying that, in a good way, my social media doesn’t show everything, which makes it more authentic as opposed to someone posting everything and it feeling inauthentic because it’s trying to be authentic. I feel like with my social media, I enjoy sharing what I do share, particularly on TikTok, and I always feel like everyone knows everything about me from what I share, and then I look at my posts and I’m like, “What am I really even saying?” I’m standing there in my outfit or whatever and that’s essentially all I’m offering. Not that that’s a bad thing at all, I started my TikTok for the purpose of sharing my outfits, but I sort of felt like I had so much more to say about life in general and I never really had the mode to do it.
I’m writing a newsletter right now about re-reading my diaries which I’ve never done before. I have three and they are very long and span over a few years. There’s one right here, this is my most recent one, and in one of the entries I say “I’m so sentimental, I should go to prison” and that’s exactly how I feel about any opportunity I get on social media. I feel like I never had the opportunity to share with words, I’m always sharing with photos because that’s what I went to school for.
One of my favourite movies ever is called Tabloid by Eroll Morris, and it’s the craziest story ever, you should honestly watch it, but he compiles a ton of references for this story — it was a tabloid story, so he has all these newspapers and found footage from the news. Then I went to see the Barbie movie and there’s the montage of all the men, with Ryan Gosling, Grease, and all that stuff, and I felt like all of that was a melting pot of feeling. So then I thought, what if I vlog because I have a very ordinary life anyway and that’s what I like about my life, and the idea was that I wasn’t going to stop my life to record every single moment, so I needed to find a way to bridge the gap.
I did a vlog with my friend Greta who stayed with us for the weekend one time and I’d never met her until that weekend. I had to figure out how to tell people how it felt to meet someone for the first time and it feel like this all-encompassing thing that you’re very grateful for it — how do you get that across? And I thought of the scene in Lady Bird when she calls her mum and asks her, “Hey mum, did you feel emotional the first time you drove through Sacramento?” Everyone feels the same feeling with that scene, so I thought, oh, I can use other people’s portrayals of feelings to tell people how I’m feeling.
Visually, I have a really good memory, so every time I’m writing a vlog voiceover, I remember that this scene from that movie is really good, or this photo from this thing is very interesting to me. I feel like one of the photos that I always use is the paparazzi picture of Leonardo DiCaprio just staring out and he just looks so blank and I love it. I just have a sort of archive of memories and photo and movie references that I call to the forefront of my mind when I’m trying to figure out how I’m feeling.
I guess it’s also like that game where you do word association.
Yes, exactly!
The other day you posted one where you mentioned that you can’t drive and it’s the clip of Regina George pulling up and saying “Get in loser, we’re going shopping!” It was the perfect clip.
It was the first thing I thought of! I recently rewatched Mean Girls and when Regina George gets told she can’t sit with them, she’s like “Find a new ride” or whatever, she won’t drive them home and I was like, “Oh, none of them drive.”
You can walk home bitches!
Yes! That was so funny to me.
Yep, I love that. And to talk a bit more about your newsletter — I think it started as something that you posted on social media, didn’t it? And now it’s evolved into a newsletter where you really build things out. It’s called
, and when I was preparing for this interview, I was thinking, wow, this chick is such a visual researcher! It’s fascinating how you gather all these things together. I thought you might be able to talk about your process. For From My Search Bar, is it literally just things that you’ve typed into your search bar? And where do these thoughts come from?I babysit this girl and I have retouched photos for her dad before and I was trying to figure out the answer to a question, so I was typing into Google and she said, “You are always Googling something.” And that’s exactly what it is. If I want to know something, I’m gonna look it up. I feel like the most recent thing in my search bar was “Movie where Katherine Hepburn rips coat as guy is walking downstairs.” It all feels very specific.
From My Search Bar started because I wanted to share so many things and, not in a narcissistic way, but when trends came up I often felt like I had been looking that up a long time ago. Not to be taking claim for any trends, obviously there is already a visual reference for me to look at so how can I claim any trend if it’s already there? But I thought, oh, it would be fun to talk about these things that I’m interested in and then post them on my story as little micro-things. I did a paparazzi one and thought I had more to say on that, so I thought, how can I take the things that I am searching for and make them into a newsletter?
Then it spiraled into just being a newsletter because I got stage fright with so many followers. I was like, God, there’s a lot of people on there, so with the newsletter I’ve ended up with the ability to talk about anything that I want. I am very chatty and I have a lot of opinions, so I could be thinking about how paparazzi photography is art or I also did one about how there is a point to documenting everything, and all that stuff. The things that I am writing about in there are genuinely things that I’ve typed into my search bar. The title came from the whole idea that I was constantly Googling something.
Right, and it’s so interesting what you say about developing an idea and fleshing it out because I find that with my own newsletter, I have this idea or even a tiny little string of an idea and I just see where this goes. Sometimes it’s a really personal little story, like last week I talked about signing up to my local library, and I ended up talking about the more systemic sides of it — how our tax pounds go towards the library, the more books we take out, the more money the library gets. It was a personal story that turned into something about the system and I think that’s something that you capture quite well in your work as well. You take something really personal and make it something relevant in society at the time. It always makes it really compelling to read.
Oh, thank you! My sister says that I write about culture, and I never thought that was exactly what I was doing, but then again, I’ll go on TikTok and see a video about a trend — I wrote that thing about the Eclectic Grandpa and how harmful those terms can be to people’s overall psyche — and it ends up being personal because I feel like I am only obsessive over things that are personal to me and my ideas all come from something that I’m interested in. If I had to write about the stock market, I’d be like, oh my god, I want to die.
But the personal stuff is kind of a portal for you to connect to the wider world. It’s how you make connections between everything, you relate it back to yourself, so I think that’s totally fair enough. One thing that I have noticed is that you say that you’re not really a writer and it’s interesting because you write these really beautiful newsletters, so actually you are kind of a writer, but you’re a twin, right? And your sister is a writer.
Yeah, she went to school for it.
As twins who are quite different — at least it seems that way from the little I’ve seen of you interacting over social media — you’re both on these really interesting creative paths and I wonder about overlap…
It’s funny because I feel like the reason I don’t say that I’m a writer is because my sister has a book coming out, so I’ll be able to say I’m a writer after her book has come out. I would never want to take something from my sister that has sort of encompassed her whole life. Chloé takes photos and she takes really beautiful photos but she doesn’t say she’s a photographer. So I also leave that writer label to her because there are very few things that we get to ourselves. Although we’re very different, people do lump us together — that’s a whole big thing about being an identical twin. She said, “You can write a book but only after I write a book”, and I said, “You can curate a photo book or a visual thing once I do it”.
I always want to respect her label because there are very few things that we get to ourselves. Yes, I consider myself a writer, but then I have Chloe who went to school for it and spends so much time on it, and mine is a very different genre and I see myself as a novice. It’s secondary to my photography.
Yeah, also it’s not necessarily your profession, whereas I feel like it’s Chloé’s job.
Yeah, and I feel like I always think of things in terms of seriousness. I’m not a very serious person, I point blank can’t take anything seriously — me and Chloé actually always say that we want to be Elizabeth and Jane Bennett, but that we’re definitely Kitty and Lydia.
It is so funny that you’re saying that because I literally watched Pride and Prejudice last night.
Oh my God, such a good movie. The 2005 one?
Yeah.
So good, have you seen the one with the American ending?
The American ending?
The one where they go back and he’s like, “And how are you enjoying yourself this evening, Mrs. Darcy?”
Oh yeah, that’s the version I watched last night.
Yeah, so we bought it but they recently cut that ending and I sat up and gasped because it just ended when Mr Darcy got approval to get married to Lizzie and then it was the end.
I had never seen that version before. So, my grandma, my dad’s mum, used to watch Pride and Prejudice every day, both the BBC version with Colin Firth and the 2005 version with Kiera Knightley…
I gotta meet her.
Well, she’s dead now! But in another life! She also watched Mamma Mia with Meryl Streep 27 times.
I really have to meet her! One summer, I watched Mamma Mia every single day!
So good! But yeah, my grandma watched Pride and Prejudice every day and she lived in Australia so I think she had the British version, and I had only ever watched that one. Then last night there was this whole final scene that I hadn’t seen before.
It’s the most glorious thing. The most romantic thing.
Anyway, let’s take it back to you! So you and your sister feel like you’re more like Lydia and Kitty, which is so funny.
Yeah, so I’m not a very serious person but I am very serious about photography and I can be serious about certain things, but it’s all very low risk. With my newsletter, it can be very unserious, but it can also get to a point where I’m looking you in the eyes, talking to you seriously about issues like accessibility to art. I find the art world very pretentious and it’s not my thing, so I am always trying to say, “You guys can do art with whatever you want”. I try to alleviate the anxiety that I had when I was young.
For sure, and I think that a lot of people need that. To realise that just because you don’t have a degree in painting doesn’t mean you can’t paint a picture — you should just do it.
Yeah, exactly.
And one thing that I think you capture super nicely in your work is youth and being young and free and being gorgeous, and a sense of nostalgia. I know you’re being present in the moment, but you’re going to look at these when you’re older and be like, “Wow, look how beautiful and young we were and what fun we had drinking wine in the park.” I just think it’s such a nice red thread through your work, this illustration of youth, and I wonder if that’s on purpose or if it’s just something that happens?
When I graduated from college, we were right on the cusp of COVID, so we didn’t have any jobs and everyone was sort of lost. I was like, everything is falling apart and I can’t make work because I can’t see people and it feels like my whole life is washing away. In my journal I had written, “I’m 23 so in 7 years I’ll be 30”, and in the writing, it was such a panicked thing. I had never felt panicked about being 30, but at that moment, I was thinking, oh my god, I have no idea when this is going to end, I have no idea what’s going on — I felt a bit like Charlotte from Pride and Prejudice: “I have no money, no prospects, no connections.” So I thought, I have to do something about this. I had left the city for a couple of months and when I got back to the city we started going on these walks, and I thought there’s something to this because we’re here in the city but there’s no one here and we’re 23 and we’re just trying to make the most of the time and be young, but also safe. I felt like the whole youth aspect of it was just that those were very tumultuous times and yet we were still being the young people that people expected us to be. I was very interested in that sort of excitement.
It felt like nothing was going on so we had all these possibilities, which is also how I view things when I hit a rock bottom — twice I have been broken up with by the same guy and both times I was like, I have no idea what I’m doing and this is going to kill me, but now look at all the places I can go! So it was such a crazy time but we were really questioning what we wanted to do because everything was put into the perspective of, hey, we’re in a time when no one knows anything, we’re all kind of on equal ground because we’re all in that young mindset.
Your 20s are insane, you feel like you’re dying every day, you feel like you’re both too old and too young to do anything and everything is temporary and you never know who you’re meeting next or what’s happening, and that is very exciting to me even though it’s very scary. It was a time when everything was changing and I wanted to capture that change. Having documentation of the moments that I would look back on as the foundations upon which the rest of my life would flourish and my friends also having that. My friends are my lifeline, so it was a way to say I love you guys so much that I need to capture every moment that we are together.
That’s so nice. I loved what you said about being 23 and thinking I have 7 years till I’m 30. And now you’re 26, aren’t you?
Yeah, I’m halfway there and, God, it’s taking forever!
Well, I’m 29, I’m turning 30 in August.
Oh! Are you a Virgo?
I’m a Leo, big fire energy. But I have been concerned about turning 30 for so long, and it just feels like it’s taken so long to come. Time goes so fast, but it also goes so slowly and I feel like COVID really perpetuated that. So now, looking back on photos from that time it feels like a lifetime ago.
Exactly, you start to see how many lives you’ve lived. For the project I’m doing on my friends, I decided to break it up into early to mid-twenties, mid to late twenties, late twenties to early thirties, because the project will end after a decade, when we’re 32. I was looking at all these things and thinking this was the summer where this was the schedule we had, and this is how we hung out, and this is what we did.
There was this very roaring twenties aspect of the summer of 2022, I believe — whenever it was after we got vaccinated — it felt like we were out a lot and really doing things. When I look back on it, I realise that I’ve only done this project for 4 years and I still have 6 years to go, essentially. So it feels like I have so much time which helps my anxiety.
It’s nice because two of my friends got engaged during the project and I have all these moments that I get to capture of my friends that aren’t often captured by a loved one. I got to take pictures of my friend getting engaged and video-tape it and although selfishly I am also using it for my own project, it’s also really important for them to have and it’s from the perspective of someone who really loves them. Again, I should be arrested for how sentimental I am — here are these people that I’ve known since I was 18 meeting someone who loves them, and my friends are that for me until I meet the person that I’m going to marry.
I always say that we get very little time to be with our friends in a girlhood way, so this project, while it is an acknowledgment of how much I love them, it’s also kind of a goodbye because we’re probably going to be completely different people by the time we’re 32 — two of my friends are getting married and I want them to do everything that they dream of doing and this project is meant to be of this time when we are together and how much it has meant to me. I’m always going to appreciate these times and I think that the whole idea of capturing it is very important to me because I want people to see the way I remember it. I want people to see how much fun I had being young with the people I was being young with, as opposed to being like, oh, I had everything figured out and I was always on top of it. It’s more like, ok, I had some terrible times but we got through it together, we did all these things, we switched jobs, we met people, we had terrible trips and we had really fun trips. It all feels very important for me to share.
And most importantly, you had lots of Margaritas.
Yes, I had quite a few! Maybe too many.
Is there anything you’re thinking about at the moment? Is there anything on your mind that’s been filling your thoughts?
Writing about re-reading my diaries, which I’ve never done before! They’re not like, Dear Diary, today I did this. It’s very much reconciling the times that I’m going through. I have this one which I started the year before I went to college, so it’s a very strange thing to go through because, 1) Tumblr was around so I was cringe as hell, and 2) it’s hard to read my emotional response to anything, but it’s also very interesting in that there is that sense of girlhood where I felt like I was completely out of my depth all the time, never doing anything right. I was never doing anything well enough to be like, oh this is what I should do.
There is one entry in there where I write, “What if my photos aren’t good enough?” But I had already gotten into FIT. Then I skipped a few years where I didn’t journal and then I got one when I was 22 and the difference between the two journals is that in one I’m asking, “Am I good enough to be a photographer?” And the other is not “am I good enough?” but “How am I going to be one?” So, it’s interesting for me to look back on my thoughts because lately I have been thinking about how temporary things are and not necessarily in a bad way, in a good way.
The essence of how I capture anything and take photos is that I need to remember something because it’s fleeting and the moment I capture it it’s already receding behind me. So, in looking at these journals, I wish I could take that girl who was going to college and be like, by the end of it you’re going to be a completely different person. And then to tell the person who started COVID, you really have nothing to worry about, there are all these opportunities you don’t know about that are happening, and although there are bad times ahead, there are so many good things that when you look back on these journals, they are the only things you are going to remember.
The only reason I remember any of the bad times is because I’ve written down things like I’m 23 and almost 30. I would have never remembered having that thought if I hadn’t written it down, so it’s nice in hindsight to look at things and know that although the emotions were very real and I was very scared, it all pans out in an unexpected way, so I shouldn’t try to control any aspect of my life aside from just sort of doing the things that I want to do.
I’m an Aries, so I’m quite impulsive but I also have a lot of follow-through, so I feel like my whole life has always been this thing of who cares as long as you're trying? You can either not do it or you can do it and fail or you can do it and keep going.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole idea of how temporary each issue I’ve ever had is and how there are so many rewards even in the onset of failure — so, not doing the things I wanted to do, COVID happening, all of that can be perceived as a failure, but I got to dance in parks with my friends and I got to start this new project, so I’m sort of seeing things in hindsight and I’m sure in 4 years when I’m 30, almost 31, that I’ll be like, you never know what’s going to happen to you so maybe don’t harp on the fact that you have to do this stupid job or that you’ve got to do something you don’t want to do for a while.
It’s funny because I also am a diary keeper and my first one was from the September a couple of weeks before I started my first year of uni. I have re-visited them several times and honestly, the first one is the cringest thing I have ever read. Even the words I use — I use the word “amazeballs” and I just think wow, what was I thinking? But then I look through the later ones and I’m actually thinking about things, there are ideas, and I’m considering things that I would never have even thought of before. I think revisiting those diaries gives you a marker in the sand for your gradual progression across the years. On a day when you’re feeling like you’re still in the same place as you were three years ago and haven’t achieved anything, you can go back and read your diary and it says, this year I really want to write for a living, and then you realise, oh wait, I am writing for a living now. You realise the progress that you’ve made! Hearing you talk about your first diary versus the one from a few years later, you no longer had the doubt that you could take good enough photos, now it was about making this thing happen. I think writing things down is so valuable in that way.
I know, yeah, and it’s funny because I feel like I am a very hopeful person, so although I can get really insecure about how I am going to do something and get caught up in that, the underlying theme of each journal is that it’s going to happen, it’s just figuring out how it’s going to happen. Even in the journal where I am very cringe and very insecure, it’s sort of like, ok, I will put the work in to get better.
One of the more surprising things from when I was 17 or 18, I wrote something along the lines of, “I want to skip ahead and be at the top of my dreams, but I know I have to climb the ladder in order to really earn it.” It’s a concept that I, time and time again, have to remind myself of, but I would never have thought that at 18 I would have had the insight to think, ok, you just have to learn how to do it and then you can do it. You can’t skip everything and you shouldn’t want to skip everything.
So, it’s interesting because it feels like you’re the same person constantly, but I look back at my time from high school and there are all these feelings that I never would have remembered. I might have remembered what they looked like, but it’s interesting to actually sit down see this sense of hope that although I might feel very lost, it’s going to work out the way that it’s going to work out, and I can’t really focus too much on the worry but I can write it down to get it off my mind.
Get it off your mind and then revisit it to see how much progress you’ve made.
Exactly, it’s very inspiring, honestly.
Inspiring yourself with your own past thoughts!
With my own cringe!
I think that’s so good and I think more people should try that because it’s so easy to get stuck in a rut of “I’m going to be doing this average thing forever” and you’re probably in a place right now that you wished you could be in before.
Exactly. I remember I was crying hysterically one time about how I was going to do something and one of my good friends’ boyfriend said, “Life is so long”, and that was really comforting. Life is so long and you sort of have all the time in the world. So many people are always saying life is short, do everything! But I find a lot more comfort knowing that life is long and that I get to do everything that I want to do and I get the time to worry about things and I get the time to feel things and then I get the time to pick myself up and actually get to work. It feels better than being like “Just take the leap, life is short! Just tell the person you love that you love them!” I have time to work up to that, I don’t have to do it right now.
No, and it means that you don’t have to be caught up in this frantic mess that people get themselves into where everything is a rush and everything is a panic. Taking your time to think about things and do things the way you want to do them is actually a very valuable thing.
The Media That Made Me
Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential- (great as a book and audiobook because he reads it). I write the way I talk, he is the reason.
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