PhotoBox

“There is a bunch of lazy ass photographers out there. not doin anything, just you know driving by taking a picture. walking out in the middle of the street taking a picture and they think they have a masterpiece. or they think that they photographed a subject they like for two weeks and they have a book. My advice to them is to really get into a project, and spend a lot of time in it and If its people get to know the people, if its the landscape get to understand the land scape. just get emotionally involved in some kind of way.”

-Debbie Fleming Caffery

I dont know if this quote is verbatim but I did my best to transcribe it from this video.

I must say there are only a few times a year that I get stopped dead and just have to take in what I am experiencing and one of those times just happened to me. I am a young photographer (yes I wrote it with a lower case p for a reason but thats another day.) and I am lost, I have been lost for some time and not matter how hard I look I cant seem to find just what I want in a life with a camera. What made me stop dead in my tracks while watching that video was the quote above; as soon as I heard the first line I knew she was talking to me, about me. I am one of those “lazy ass photographers” who assumes that I can just wander around and create gold, I have always assumed that inspiration is just going to slap me in the face someday and suddenly I will have a masterpiece. I have never been more wrong in my life.

The thing I took away from this video is passion does not start when the camera hits your eye, passion is a substance that only lives within certain people in the world and its something that has to be earned. Passion is not about caring or wanting to know about a subject, passion is about NEEDING to know about a subject. Passion is about the exploration of something because you dont know what else to do with yourself, you can’t go anywhere or do anything without seeing something relating to what your passionate about. I am admitting right now that I am at a place in my life in which I lack passion for what I am doing, not my job or my school, not the snapshots I take while I am wandering (which happens more than if like to admit); but instead I lack that substance that is passion.

People always ask when I tell them I am a photographer “what kind of pictures do you take?” or something similar and it was not until this christmas when I was in North Carolina visiting my family that I was even able to vocalize this. For the longest time I have had no idea what truly draws me into photography or what has motivated me to always carry a camera, then when I was talking to my father and my brother I felt it. I told them that all I want to do with a camera is tell stories. All I want to do with a camera is use it to tell someone out there a story, no matter if I have experienced it or if I am just an outsider looking in trying to understand. The only thing that matters to me is the narrative. The type of story does not matter to me, whether its a wedding or a book I have worked on for years the narrative is still true and will always be the center of what my photography will represent.

I am still lost.