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Why Am I A Photographer?
I’m always asked “how” but not “why.”
Note: This was written during the Medium Creator Hub Weekly Writing Hours, answering prompt #3. Please check out the rest of the meetings and workshops here.
The first question asked after “what do you do” is “how long have you been a photographer” and the second is usually “how did you become a photographer.”
Honestly, it just felt like a constant. I’m a lifelong creative and have always expressed myself in whatever medium was available. I started dappling in photography as a teenager in the 1990s. When I was 15, I owned one of those Polaroid I-zones with the sticky-backed paper. It was marketed as a toy, but if you told me it was a toy, I would have scoffed and insisted on its value as an art tool akin to a paintbrush or sculptor chisel. The fun was in taking a photograph, then placing it in a curated scene in an artsy, teenage angsty way.
By the time I was a student at the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, I was learning Photoshop and using a basic point-and-shoot digital camera, back when they had poor dynamic range, were more expensive than film cameras, and ate up all the AA batteries in your house. I had some film point-and-shoots as well and I can always be counted to be “the photographer” among my group of friends.