Hello, my friend - We meet again
I got my first camera when I was 15. I want to say it was a Fujifilm Finepix. A little silver digital point and shoot. I had wanted my own camera because it was the golden age of Xanga and MySpace, and we had just started posting photos of our lives (i.e., absolutely chaotic and lovingly embarrassing photos with friends) online, and I wanted to upgrade from scanning pictures from disposable cameras. That’s all it was used for, for a while.
I remember the first photo I took that made me feel like I had tapped into something new. It was a tree in my front yard, taken from my bedroom window on the second floor. Photography 101 is actually just “Tree Photos”, I think. It’s a rite of passage. There’s no doubt in my mind that it was not a good photo, especially considering I edited it to hell with the built-in photo editor that came with the family PC. But that’s the one that would lead me to want to be a photographer, even if I didn’t really know what that was going to mean.
My best friend had recently moved 1,000 miles away, but we were lucky to be in the aforementioned golden age of social internet where we could talk every day (if you are young, it’s important to note that this was something that had only been widely available for a few years). She also had an interest in photography around the same time, and I don’t know if I would have gotten so deep into it without her. She had access to a DSLR, which I eventually would upgrade to, and an older sibling with photography experience. I loved sharing photos back and forth with her. We would give each other light critiques (as if we had any right), but we were really just big fans of each other. We were both entirely self-taught for several years, depending on written guides (no Youtube, folks) to learn Photoshop. She and I, as well as my other creatively-inclined friends, started posting to DeviantArt. I’ll probably have to make a separate post dedicated to eulogizing that site (I know it’s still around, but it’s not the same). Suddenly, my community of one expanded exponentially. I loved sharing photos there, and I loved scouring the site for hours and hours finding really interesting art by people all over the world. By the end of high school, my photography focus was live music and doing “conceptual photoshoots” with my friends (heavily influenced by America’s Next Top Model, of course). My small, rural hometown had a surprisingly lively local music scene. When the more active bands would play in the nearby towns, I was able to tag along and take photos. As I entered adulthood and moved to a bigger town with a bigger music scene, my community was built around it, and my life became more and more entwined with it.
At a certain point the scene I was experiencing was nearing a collapse, and so I was, too. For a while, I was trying to push through the burn out. I don’t know if I even acknowledged it. I so deeply wanted to create, but I wasn't finding any joy in what I was doing, which left me feeling like I was failing. I had spent almost half my life at that point identifying as a photographer. For the first time, I wasn’t sure if that’s what I was anymore. I didn’t pick up a real camera for four years.
I had felt so creatively disconnected from myself that I had basically purged all evidence of the years of work I had created. I would occasionally stumble on old photos I had taken, and found myself sentimental over it - and more surprisingly, I was proud of it. Little by little, I would get glimmers of the old pang that used to constantly be with me. Something about living through “unprecedented times” gives you the gift of assessing what really matters to you. I decided to take advice that I have often given others: If it’s fun, do it. If it’s not, don’t. So I dove back in, armed with feeling secure in only doing it for myself. I’ve unearthed photos from the last 10+ years, and have decided to give them the dignity of a place of semi-permanence on the internet. I’m shooting what I want to shoot. I realize there’s a bit of hypocrisy in saying that I (kindly) don’t care what other people think, while also creating a website for the purpose of making things available for other people to see. But if paying for a website that does not in turn generate any income and single-handedly starting a fruitless campaign to bring back long-form blogs doesn’t say “doing it for myself”, I’m not sure what does.
If I’m being honest, the four year lull disconnected me far more than I realized. I used to so strongly feel part of a community, but everything feels very different now - both in real live and online. I won’t go into how dire the social media/art sharing experience is (another time). I don’t know what the realistic path to a solution is, but I’m starting with outwardly existing.