I have been taking pictures for several years, but I would never have called myself a photographer until about a year and a half ago. I can almost pinpoint the exact moment when my camera went from being something that was lazily used to capture such things as pretty flowers, to something that is necessary to help me sustain my sanity.
I was having a very emotional reaction to something that was going on in my life, and not knowing what to do with myself, I turned to photography to try and put my feelings into a more manageable format. It was like a blindingly bright lightbulb went off in my head.
From then on I started taking pictures and posting them online almost every day instead of a few times a month. It was like a drug. And not only had I found something that was helping me immensely, I had apparently found something that a few others also responded to. Almost without fail, my most personal pictures – the ones that I’ve seriously contemplated not posting at all because they are so exposing – are the ones that have gotten the most numerous and positive reactions.
The connection you make with someone when you show them a picture that is so closely linked to who you are as a person, is, I think, unique. You’re expressing to them who you are as a person in a way that would probably be hard to replicate using words, and in taking a liking to what you do, that person is also showing you who they are in a subtle way.
That has also been a factor in keeping me going sometimes, the fact that I may feel absolutely awful some days, but by expressing that in a picture, I’m creating something beautiful out of it, that hopefully brings something positive to other people’s lives.
To me, words and images are almost inseparable, and I rarely know which comes first for any given image. On some images I superimpose the words associated with it, but even when I don’t, which is most of the time, they are always there in the background.
It’s like a story being written out in my mind, and I just illustrate a few scenes from it. However, I don’t expect people to see the exact same things as I do in my images, in fact I think it’s better if everyone has their own interpretations, but I always know what it is I want to say.
I don’t know if I have a particular photographic style, but I guess I do at least have a very clear idea of what I like and how I want my images to look. I rarely shoot with anything other than my 50mm and 35mm primes, and I process most of my images in roughly the same way.
Apart from getting to know my aesthetics, the only thing I hope people take away from my photography is that it is a part of me, and while I do hope to become as ‘good’ a photographer as I can, expression will always come before technical perfection.
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