Photographer & Creative Director Hannah Faith Lord also known as H.F.L. demonstrates a life well-lived with the grit and grace that we find deeply refreshing. Hannah has a unique way to strategically and simply invest in many corners of her creativity. ‘She has a resourcefulness about her that resembles traditional characteristics brought into contemporary times.’ says MG METHOD founder, Maxine Goynes. 

Having experienced great loss in her life, Hannah shares with us how she still chooses love in spite of obstacles that have deeply shaped her. 

In this podcast Q&A recap, we pull moments from our longer conversation to highlight the brilliance and insight that we know will help us all understand how we can learn to make our own lives art.  

*This article has been edited for context and clarity.

MG:

I think many times freelance artists &  people have no idea how you make your art your career but before we get there, will you give us your full name and let us know where you're from?

HFL:

Yeah. Hannah, Faith, Lord. And yes, I was raised a Christian. I came from a big family of Lords. There's 10 kids. Yeah. Five girls, five boys. I was born in Minnesota in a small County, in an old school house. Actually. It's a very  Little House on the Prairie, honestly.

MG:

Where do you fall? 

HFL:  

I'm number two. So queen bee, basically. I have an older brother, and then there was three more boys below me before I had sisters. So I grew up with all brothers until I was almost eight or nine years old. I was so happy when I finally had a sister. And then after that it was like another girl. And then there was a boy and then two more girls. So my youngest brother, he grew up with all sisters , and I grew up with all the boys, so we have a special connection. I feel like growing up with brothers is pretty cool. 

MG:

How would you describe your family environment? 

HFL:

The highlight of my childhood was we grew up at the base of a mountain and it was a tiny little house, just one floor, which was terrible because there's a lot of tornadoes and we had nowhere to go underground, but it was such a dream life for a kid because we were homeschooled.

My mom was very much into learning off of experiences. So we did a lot of reading, but a lot of times our learning was to go out and experience nature. If we're doing any science projects, it was outdoors,  and we're actually doing things with our hands and feeling.I think it was such a great experience for me, because it really showed me that I don't have to follow the social norm of life. We were always up in the woods. My dad built us a fort. He was the greatest dad, always doing stuff for us.  

“We didn’t have a lot, but I felt rich because we had so much space to explore.”

Kids would come over sometimes and they were blown away. So, I feel really lucky for that. As I got older, things  were always kind of free spirited, in that kind of way.  My parents were restrictive, religiously in the beginning with things such as  how I dressed. But, they just wanted us to be good human beings, you know? 

MG:

Were you homeschooled then throughout middle school? High school? The whole bit? 

HFL:

Yeah, I ended up going to college while I was in high school. My final two years in high school, I did a program offered at a lot of schools as a way to get kids into college and through their general courses for free. So then I ended up going into personal fitness training, and I studied and did it all online.

And then I worked for a chain of fitness studios called Snap fitness in Minnesota, and I taught women. I did that for a little over a year until I was like, “Oh, I think I need to get into creative!” Sometimes you’ve  got to kind of go through these like changes to see where you want to be.

But my three things in life that I was like, I'm going to do at some point, whether they're all altogether or separately was fitness, fashion and photography. I started with my three F's (laughs).

MG:

YES! 

HFL:

At the time, I had no idea that photography was something that you could actually sustain yourself with. It just felt like ‘too fun’ of a thing. I already did it for fun, I thought there's no way someone could make a living.

MG:

When you were growing up, who was the first person that kind of introduced you to photography in the first place? 

HFL:

It would have been my parents, like a film camera or something, but I think I was so intrigued with the fact that you could capture something in time and it would forever stay that way. Something that fascinated me, was the idea that you could make up a storyline and people would watch it and feel like they were there, you know? And so using a VHS camera, I tried to do that.

MG:

What would you capture?

HFL:

I would shoot my sisters on like 20 film. Most of it turned out very creepy because that film is so old that it's just like girls running in fields with their blonde hair like there were ghosts everywhere. My photography back then was very dark and eerie, not because I was dark, but because I found a romance in the human form mixed with the elements of the earth and a lot of it was faceless.

MG:

What else were you drawn to?

HFL:

I would also do a lot of thrift shopping. So I would go and just dig and I'd find so much vintage stuff. I just enjoyed cultivating things that made me feel happy about, you know, life. It was having those little things, that you did that were fun that you didn't even have to have an end goal of making money off of it.

MG:

How did it start to become real work for you or something you could monetize?

HFL:

I started a blog called Hannah’s Closet. Which was really just an archive of outfits we’d put together and style. A friend and I  started a jewelry company together, actually, and this was when Instagram was just becoming a business thing. It didn’t even really have any tools. We just started an Instagram. I did all the visuals and she did all the website stuff. We would do shoots together and then we started selling to stores and it  picked up pretty quick. 

MG:

So how did you guys navigate that? 

HFL:  

Well, we would look at how much time it would take us and what the cost of the material was, how much it cost us, how much time it took to put together. I was so minimalistic back then, you wouldn't catch me dead with this!

(Hannah's referencing her headboard, this beautiful headboard.)

 I mean, the way I live right now and the type of color that are in my life is so opposite to how I was. I wanted  to be so seamlessly minimal that everything just feels clean all the time, because I also growing up in a big family that was a chaotic lifestyle with stuff everywhere all the time.

MG:

I love that you said that connection. I'm also really drawn to things that are minimal but I never really even had that connection. You realize it's different for everyone's large family, but there is a sense of peace in minimalism. There is a sense of security and safety with less choice. I often end up feeling more joy with what I have. Sometimes people think of minimalism with an idea that there's a deprivation, but I actually feel more full when there is less. Is that true for you also? 

HFL:

Something that I had to break free from, is that it's okay to be messy. It's okay to not clean the house up all day, every single day. It's okay to have a chair full of your clothes. My room is always kind of the place where I am creating the mess. That's okay for me, the rest of the house, I try to keep it a little more like okay…  this is a communal area.I clean up my stuff, but it's okay to let the mess fall because at the end of the day, I am organized in who I am and I'm organized in my life. I know that the mess doesn't define anything about me.

MG:

So how does one take that life experience and create the life that you have?

HFL:

I'm not a competitive person, but I do have a high standard for myself.  I think seeing how much my family struggled, just to be able to have the things that they want, whether it is through having money or not. I just always wanted to find a way to cultivate my life in an organized way where I still could show creativity. One of my biggest inspirations for art is Cy Twombly. I think his art was so chaotic, but his life and his studio was very clean and put together. I don't know about his full life, but he had a sense of  minimalism. That's how I saw my parents and my life. I want to have the full package, like my life can be crazy internally and have these scribbles across it.

MG:

How do you see that affect you now?

HFL:

I have full control and power over who I want to be and where I am. It was a great upbringing. It always comes with those black holes in life that suck your energy and could make you be a dark person. When I moved out of home my little brother, at 15, got sick with leukemia.

My mom being a holistic person, she never took him, or any of us to the hospital. When she finally did at that point it was so bad he couldn't walk. I carried him on my back to the car. The doctors knew immediately what it was, he went straight into chemo. It turned into this whole thing and he almost died and he was on life support for like multiple months through that summer. They were saying, there's no way he'll come out of this. It was such a traumatic experience. He then got well and we thought he would be fine. He ended up being totally fine and cancer-free for four years and then he just relapsed and it all happened super fast. There was some doctor errors that happened that ended up inevitably causing his death.

So throughout,  my process of moving out of home and becoming my own person, I was, still having super negative things that were happening at home. It was hard for me to feel independent enough to be mentally clear and figure out what I wanted to do with my life, because I felt like I couldn't actually go anywhere. I felt like I couldn't move out of the country or the state. I felt guilty for even wanting to do that.

MG:

There comes a point where you feel almost like a guilt sometimes to enjoy your life, right? You feel like, “I don't want to leave this person behind in some way.” I'm always curious, especially for someone who loses a family member so young, how did you navigate grief and trauma and despair in that way?

HFL:

I'm sorry for that loss for you too.( addressing Maxine’s fathers passing)  I don't understand how people get through it because it was the most traumatic thing I've ever experienced. The fact that it happens all the time is just so terrible. And death in general is just so unknown and so scary.

But, I think escapism is something that I would have to say is the only way that I got through it. Honestly, I met my then husband during that time, we’re not married anymore, we were dating when the relapse happened, so I had someone I could escape mentally with who he came from a very solid family. It felt like I had had a safe place. He was from New Zealand. When I said I felt guilty leaving, it was because I actually left for a little while before he relapsed. When the relapse happened, I felt like I shouldn't leave. I kind of still had to because, I was dating this person and he was a skier, so he was traveling all over the place. It was hard for us to see each other unless I was going to see him. 

MG:

Completely.

HFL:

The doctors told us, “We're going to be honest, your brother's probably not going to make it to the next summer.” My heart didn't want to believe that that was true. But I also felt, Joshua needs to be at this wedding. So we got married a year sooner then I wanted to, and I'm sure for him too. We were like, you know what? We want to be together forever so we're going to make this what it is.

We planned the wedding in like two months. It all turned out so beautiful and it was still one of the greatest days ever. Even though we're not together now, it was such a great day cause my brother was there. He was happy. He wasn't even supposed to be there. The doctors said no, and he just checked himself out. He was wearing a mask. It was worth having him there and to be joyful and experience it. He hadn't done anything that wonderful in so long because he had been so restricted to a hospital bed. He was going through torment and he got to have this wonderful day with us. I had all of my special people there with me, and I had someone that I felt like I was in love with at the time.

MG:

So so special. 

HFL:

It ended up being six months after we got married, he passed away. I was there in the room when it happened and we were all there and it was so surreal. It still doesn't feel like that's something I experienced. We just can't comprehend, seeing someone go through that.

Basically I just escaped from the grief (through the marriage). After the divorce, I actually went to counseling and saw why the marriage ended and why I was the way I was throughout the marriage. Before we got married, I was already dealing with resentment and grief (for my brother).

MG:

Totally understandable. 

HFL:

Now I understand that bad things are just going to keep getting thrown at you because that's how life is. Gravity's a real thing. You can pray as hard as you want, but if you drop that ball it is gonna hit the ground. My family always thought we could pray our way out of things or just be like, “Oh, everything's gonna be positive, we believe.” I  have my spiritual side and my spiritual faith, but I know that we do live in this world where, science is real. Things happen that are negative, whether you like it or not, there is an uncontrollable space we live in.

It was too overwhelming. It was too over bearing. In grief counseling, I learned that when someone dies you should stay with your family for awhile, you should be around friends that understand what you're going through and you should let the grief happen.

You have to go through stuff. It just sucks. It would be nice to swing through life above all the negativity, but that's not how it is. You've got to deal with the demons to get to the brighter side of things.

Now I know that the grief process is a healthy process and it helps to speak and grieve about it openly. It is important to connect with other people who have gone through similar things and find those outlets. I think mental awareness now is so much more prevalent than it was back then.

I had suicidal thoughts after the divorce and I didn't want to be alive and I didn't think I could ever get back up on top after something so traumatic, like losing my brother and then having a divorce happen within a year and a half or two years later. I felt like there was a mountain that I didn't want to climb. I'm like, I don't care what that view is, I am not climbing that.

I've worked with multiple brands now regarding mental awareness. I feel super open about talking about depression and anxiety and the dark thoughts.

MG:

Can you talk a little bit about the routines and practice that you do now to stay on top of your brain health, mental health and emotional wellbeing? What does that look like for in your daily life?

HFL:

Self affirmation is a big one for me. So affirming myself in positivity daily. What you say out loud affects your internal body. You're speaking to your vessel. There's just so much power in the tongue and what you say. Words are powerful, how you say them to other people, but also to yourself.

I also pray and I thank God for all the things that I already have. I try and have a positive outlook on those things instead of focusing on the things that I don’t.

Listen to the episode: Spotify | Apple Podcasts

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