What is photography to me?
If you ask ten photographers to answer the question “What is photography?” you’d probably get twelve or so different answers. Photography is such a deeply personal endeavor that none of those answers would be right or wrong, and most of them probably wouldn’t make much sense to anyone other than the person saying it.
To me, photography actually has very little to do with photographs. Of course photos are the end result, but I think photography has more to do with how a person sees the world. Modern life is messy, chaotic, fast-paced; all in all just a jumbled mess of people, things, moments, and so much more.
Photography, then, is the act of looking at this fracas of life and identifying what is special: what is worth looking at, worth capturing, and worth remembering. A photo is not the sum of its parts, it’s the absence of anything else. One subject, one moment, one idea; a single unit chosen from the fabric of human experience and presented to the world in tangible form.
That, to me, is photography.
My photography journey
I didn’t discover my love of photography until the Coronavirus pandemic, when I was desperate to find some sort of activity that would get me out of the house and feeling productive. I bought a “beginner camera” (huge mistake) and started taking photos just around my neighborhood. I didn’t have a style yet or even really know what kinds of pictures I’d want to take, so photos from the early days are a truly random combination of flowers, people, trees, sunsets, boats, storefronts, signs, and pretty much whatever happened to be directly in front of me as I was walking around with my camera. I remember looking at photos I took in those early days and thinking how amazing they were! (They weren’t)
As I learned and grew, I started learning more about actual photography concepts. Before this, it’s hard to overstate how little I knew. If you had asked me about the composition of a photo I’d probably get confused and mutter something about electrons. Aperture was the science company from the Portal games, and exposure was usually a crime. But still, I learned. Youtube was a godsend. I would be curious about a topic, find a video about it, and then let autoplay do its thing for the next 3 hours. I very quickly outgrew my beginner camera and upgraded to a Fujifilm X-T3, a risky decision considering how recently I had bought my first camera and the fact that the X-T3 was already outdated, the X-T4 having been released a few months prior. No regrets though, I’m still rocking that same X-T3 almost 4 years later with no thoughts of upgrading again for the foreseeable future.
Then came the big move: I packed up my bags and started a new life in Copenhagen. In the first few months here, I got to know the city though a viewfinder, going on weekly photo walks around various neighborhoods and finding cool things to capture. That’s still how I discover new places when I travel; photography is a wonderful incentive to just wander through streets or parks or trails, seeing what I see and taking pictures to prove it. What started as a desperation hobby has actually changed the way I see the world: at home or traveling, and whether or not I’m holding my camera, I see the world in photos.
This site is more than a way to share my photographs, it’s a way to share the way I see the world.