Why Photography?

I can’t recall how many times people have asked me what got me into photography. Why did I choose this life path? What made me want to pick up a camera in the first place? And while this is everything I’ve wanted to do and somehow so much more there still isn’t a linear path that took me down the road of pursing photography as a career, but what I’ve come to realize is that the best paths in life are never so clear cut.

From the time I can remember I’ve always wanted to create. As a young child I was infatuated with words; the more words on a page the better. I loved the stories I could create with them and emotions I could evoke; however, life had other plans for me. One accident after the next led me to suffer from several concussions — to the point where I don’t even remember all of them now — where words were simply beyond my reach and I had to find a new way to communicate what I was feeling and thinking when words just failed to come. 

Now enter photography. A new medium for communicating that my previous infatuation with words had failed to allow me to see. I had always dabbled around with it a bit, taking my mom’s point and shoot camera out into the yard and photographing her flowers. Creating albums on my Facebook titled “Photography” that were filled with hundreds of photos of just flower pictures and not much else. Yet there was something there that was always pulling me back, something that kept me out in my yard for hours until the sun began to set and my bare feet were damp with dew.

When I met my high school photography teacher — not until my junior year — he opened up the world of photography even more to me. Showing me just how expansive my subject pool could be and what I could create, showing me that I didn’t have to take pictures of “just flowers”. Suddenly the sound of the shutter release set my soul on fire. The thrill of trying to capture a story or a feeling within one frame was intoxicating. I craved to create images that people could relate to and feel the emotion right along with my subjects. That was the potential I had been feeling all along every time I held that point and shoot and took it outside. That was the extra something I had been searching for during all of those hours. The potential to take what would otherwise take hundreds of pages to describe and capture it in a single image.

Photography allowed me to create beautiful pieces of art that gave me so much more room for freedom and expression than I had ever thought imaginable. Through every painful diagnosis, every new illness and every closed door photography gave me my new open window; my window to create. Photography gave me a way to tell my stories that I never thought possible and I dived head first into that world, but not until my senior year of high school. It was that year that I felt my creativity and personality blossom and I finally found my voice. The thing that made me want to get out of bed in the morning, the one thing that I could see myself doing for the rest of my life. Yet, you can imagine my moms bewilderment when I came home in October saying I not only wanted to major in photography — something I had just seriously started talking about the previous year — but I wanted to move to Arizona to do it.

While she was reluctant at first, after looking at my images I was creating in class and the genuine enthusiasm I had when thinking up new ideas she finally agreed to let me, the baby of the family, move out of state to pursue my passions. Now after four years, countless photo projects, thousands of images taken, new subjects and skills learned, and graduating — during a global pandemic — if there is one thing I am even more sure of now than I was four years ago is that there is nothing I would rather be doing. In a time when we are all sure of very little because the world is unpredictable, I am sure that this is what I am meant to do with my life. To create art and make people feel like the best versions of themselves when we work together. Photography has given me so much freedom and the ability to express myself in ways I never thought possible and now I want to use my work and creativity to help tell other people’s stories as well.