Meet Lilly Kubit, a Chatham University photojournalism student and Mt. Lebanon native, who we are excited to welcome to our internship program this summer.
If you see a girl walking around Mt. Lebanon with her head in the clouds in a khaki green jacket and black Doc Martens, a camera slung over her shoulder, odds are it’s me.
While I have big aspirations of becoming a photojournalist and maybe one day having a photo be featured in a museum, I tend to think small. I see my life like a movie, and if you’ve ever seen the behind the scenes for any blockbuster film, you know the smallest details make the biggest difference. So why do we not appreciate those small things in our everyday lives?
A two-photo self-portrait series.
Some of my fondest memories involve moments that many people would feel are insignificant. I look lovingly back on cool nights where I stargazed on the baseball fields at Markham Elementary. I smile when I reminisce about my dog cuddling up next to me in my room on my last day home before moving into my college dorm.
Family game night at the Kubits’ during quarantine.
As I toured the Municipal Building on the first day of my internship, I remembered sitting outside the building and peeking through the windows one balmy summer night during a First Friday years ago, eating a Triple Push Pop from DiNardo’s candy store while my parents conversed with their Lebo friends. When the roles reversed and I walked through that very room on my tour and peeked out onto Washington Road, I thought about how wonderful that First Friday was and how little Lilly could never imagine 20-year-old Lilly dressed in fancy clothes interning in that exact building. She was focused on that delicious Push Pop.
Selections from a photo series about a camping trip with my friends.
Perhaps this is the reason that when it came time to decide what kind of photography I wanted to capture for a living, I chose raw and unedited photojournalism instead of flashy fashion or heavily edited Instagram photoshoots.
I have trained myself to see and remember the beauty in even the smallest of things, and hope to nurture that ability in others. Through making mundane and insignificant moments captivating, I hope to show people that there is more to life than job promotions and extravagant vacations. Sometimes lying in the grass with your dog can bring more happiness than anything else. We don’t have to have a perfect Hollywood life for our lives to be picturesque, we just need to refocus our lens.