Creative Origin: Volume I

Featuring Michael Marhefka - Film Photographer

Creative Origin Begins With me

This creative origins project began with me asking questions. Contemplating my own story. Wondering why creativity had woven its way into my life. Why it became something that I couldn’t shake or move on from. I began exploring the idea that humans are intrinsically creative as a direct result of being created. This project’s aim is to find Northeast Ohio Creatives and showcase the things that make them unique. To see how their lives have become linked to creating beauty in an attempt to capture it and share it with others. It’s funny to use myself for a project focused on understanding and exploring the lives of others, but I wanted to share how simply and wonderful taking time to notice the ways you contribute to a more beautiful world truly can be. Through film photography, I aimed to capture what I consider to be my creative origin. Read more about me and my project below.

This is the first of 12 creative origin stories that my wife and I hope to capture and share. At the end of the series we aim to combine each origin story into a cohesive narrative surrounding creativity, beauty, and the artistry of every day life.

A Letter From The Artist (Me)

“Hey there,

My name is Michael Marhefka, and I currently live in Akron, Ohio. I am married to my tender-hearted wife, Abby, who walks with me as I pursue an endless array of creative dreams.

I have been a photographer for nearly a decade, a journey that has been a hobby, full-time work, and everything in between. These days I primarily pursue personal projects, all of which explore people, places, and the stories they tell.

My heart has always been to help people see the world as something worthy of wonder. I believe creativity is one of the ways God gently reconnects us to Himself, to one another, to ourselves, and to the places we call home.

It is through this vision, and through many prayerful steps of faith, that my wife and I have begun to see so many of our dreams take shape as we build and participate in our dream we call Common Place. Our hope is simple: to cultivate spaces where people gather with joy, inspire one another, and learn practical ways to see the world with greater wonder. We hope this work leaves you feeling encouraged to seek beauty in your own life and more attentive to the wonder of sharing life with others.

Excited to create,

Michael”

Michael’s Origin Zine & Reflection

Each origin project has been summarized into a zine (mini magazine) that we print and share at a monthly event in our home. Click the image below to preview my zine… then come back and read my full Q&A answers and more details about this project.

Zine

Reflection

Simple beauty is a phrase that comes to mind when I think of this project. My appreciation for pears was gifted to me through a quirky professor in college. His fascination always confused me, until a season where I needed to understand my photography differently.

In many ways I had become burnt out with creating for money. Searching for meaning and purpose in my work. To combat this feeling I took time to create without an end goal. This produced an image that changed the way I viewed photography - a simple, yet dare I say striking image. It was in this shoot that I feel my photography began to shift. I began to slow down. To linger. To see the world a little differently.

After moving back to Ohio after some time in North Carolina, I have found myself in a similar season of need. A season where I long to see the world freshly. To understand creativity as a gift for us to express our inner beings.

To connect with God, with ourselves, with our neighbors, and with the places we call home.

I couldn’t think of a better way to foster this reconnection than to listen to the wise words of my professor and once again photograph pairs.

Location

This shoot took place at Kendall Lake in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. This was the first park Abby and I went to while living in this area and has always been special to us.

Composition

Still life images, meaning staged inanimate objects, have always caught my attention. This project will focus on the stylistic arranging of fruit in nature, no additional props.

Subject

Leaning into to simple beauty, I chose pears as the subject for this shoot. With their many varieties, colors, and shapes, their organic appearance blended perfectly with the background of the park.

Camera Gear

I captured the images on a 1986 Nikon N2020 AF Film Camera; Loaded with Portra 400. Film is my primary medium these days, as I find it helps me slow down and be more present while shooting.

Q&A

When you think of creativity what comes to mind?

• To me creativity is a direct result of being created. An innate desire to translate what we see and feel into something others can see and feel too. Taking what isn’t and transforming it into what is.

Was there a moment or experience that opened your eyes to a creative world?

• Music. As a kid we almost exclusively listened to classical music. I couldn’t help but hear the rhythms and keys of the piano and not move with them. I would then turn those movements into stories that I would force my siblings to enact. Hearing music and seeing pictures, visions, stories.

What would you consider to be your creative origins?

• Growing up in a small clan of six, I think I found safety within my family structure. Our home was a place that fostered boredom. Limited screen times, lots of outside adventures. A need to be independent. Relatively low income, if there was a want, my parents would encourage us to pursue it. This environment for me, led to endless creativity. Endless outlets.

Who or what first nurtured your creativity? Parent, teacher, friend, place, experience?

• I remember my dad being the person who helped me create stories. I still have the notebook of him writing down the worlds that I would create. He also is entrepreneurial and a dreamer/visionary.

What outlets does your creativity most naturally flow through? Why those?

• Writing. Writing has been my most consistent form of creativity. My writing as a kid was full of invented worlds, characters, and stories. Today my writing tends to focus on understanding the real world and the characters and stories within them. Story is a big word in my mind. Though photography is another outlet, all of my creative passions are driven by my passion for story.

Where do your best ideas usually find you?

• In the quiet. Whether that is driving around without music or a podcast, walking through the woods, or spending time alone sitting and writing. There is something special about lingering in the present moment. Being fully available. It ignites a desire within me to create. It triggers new meanings. New outlets. The silent moments can produce a loud internal dialogue that is endlessly creative.

What blocks in creativity keep you from doing what you love?

• Fear. Lots of fear. Trying my best to comprehend what truly drives me. What really matters. Stories and people are my driving force. But I fear rejection. Fear of yet another incomplete idea. Fear of how to sustain a dream. Not knowing how to create without applause.

Does money influence your ability to accomplish work you are consistently proud of?

• I want to say yes, but again. I think its more fear. Fear of not being perfect. However infinite money might take some of the weight of providing away, allowing me more freedom to engage bigger ideas. But I like grassroots beginnings. Ideas started out of abundance of wealth generally don’t receive my attention. It’s the ideas that had humble beginnings and that have to use creativity in every area, especially funding and sustainability to continue growing into community staples.

Learning To Notice

Michael is someone who has always seen the world a little differently.

His small clan of six was a safety net that led to endless creativity and imagination. From dancing to classical music with his siblings around the house, to sharing vivid dreams (sometimes they were true) and having his dad write down stories in a notebook he still holds dear. From then until now, Michael has always been searching for meaning and purpose through the seeing and sharing of stories.

As he grew older, writing stories eventually became documenting them through photography. The heart stayed the same, “what is the story I can capture that otherwise might be missed?”. Photography cultivated an even greater appreciation for the world. For beauty. For wonder. The pursuit of this question continues to shape his creative works.

These days, Michael photographs almost exclusively on vintage film cameras. The slower pace has become part of the practice. Without the instant feedback of a digital screen, every frame requires trust, patience, and attention. He has found that the process of slowing down often reveals more than the photograph itself. It teaches him to linger.

Lately, that lingering has extended beyond photography.

Since moving back to Akron with his wife, Abby, he has found himself paying closer attention to neighborhoods, gardens, front porches, and ordinary conversations with neighbors. He has become convinced that flourishing communities are not built by extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, but by ordinary people choosing to notice, gather, and care for the places they already call home.

That conviction has led to the creation of Common Place.

Not a coffee shop. Not a gallery. Not a print publication. Rather, an ongoing experiment in hospitality, creativity, and belonging. A place where strangers become neighbors, local artists tell their stories, and everyone is reminded that creativity is not reserved for the gifted few, but is woven into being human itself.

Michael admits that fear has often been his greatest obstacles. Not a lack of ideas, but the fear that he would never be enough. Fear that he would be rejected. Only through the voice of his wife has he begun to believe that meaningful work rarely starts fully formed. Like gardens, neighborhoods, and friendships, it grows slowly through faithful attention and humble beginnings.

If there is one hope behind his work, it is not that people leave impressed by a photograph or inspired by an idea. It is that they leave looking at the world differently. That they notice the aging brick building they’ve driven past a hundred times. The conversation waiting on the front porch. The beauty hidden inside ordinary places.

Because perhaps creativity begins there.

With learning to notice.

The Beginning of A Dream

All of these origin projects are a part of a bigger dream ‘Common Place’ - This project has been in the works for almost five years. The goal has always been to gather, inspire and educate both the creative and proclaimed uncreative to see the world as worthy of wonder. Not only to admire, but to participate.

For now, we are gathering friends and neighbors in our home to drink coffee, explore Northeast Ohio artists, and to participate in conversation and activities that expand what we understand as creativity.

We are excited to see where our investment into Akron leads, what relationships we can foster, and the stories we can share.