Fotográfica
By the time I started photo school in September of 2004 I had been nursing a low key obsession with photography for the better part of 14 years. Although I had always been interested in visual art and had spent endless hours wandering around museums, filling sketchbooks, and coating canvasses and covering walls with surreal figures, swirls and splashes of colour throughout my childhood, photography had for a long time proven to be somewhat elusive. Sure, I had a point and shoot, the same little point and shoot all the kids had, but deep down I knew there was more to photography than fake smiles and simply making a camera go “click.”
Armed with a broken AE-1, I started classes at the New England School of Photography ready to try and learn how to make good pictures and how to scratch out a living doing so. As a photography student I was not a remarkable talent but what I lacked in technique I made up for in enthusiasm. My time as student in photo school was well spent as I worked my way through a rigorous course of classes that included large format, studio work, lighting techniques, darkroom printing, retouching, digital darkroom, location work and so on… My instructors, while excellent, gave me no illusions about my future prospects as a creative professional and perhaps undersold the importance of developing business acumen, or at very least having a willingness to learn about running a business as a crucial step towards success as a creative professional. They weren't mean about it, but their sobering advice came with the weight of all the decades of hard work and struggle it took them to get to where they were. They explained their reality as freelancers and added that unless you are a prodigious talent, had a major “in," or were independently wealthy, upon graduation you should expect to be wading through shit in the trenches with everyone else on the first rung of the employment ladder. It was either that or if not, as one instructor said it, "ladies, you can always marry rich.”
The two year slog towards graduation was at times as frustrating as it was fortifying. Not only did I learn enough to start honing the skills I needed to become a decent photographer I learned that despite what I had been led to believe at various stages in my young life, prior to photo school, gender has anything to do with your ability to create quality and impactful imagery. With encouragement I realized that despite the fact that I was “just a girl” with a liberal arts degree and a smattering of formal arts education, I had a voice that needed to be heard and gender aside there was no reason why I couldn’t be just as good a photographer, or business owner as the next person.
In the late spring of 2006, just after a very dramatic and emotional final portfolio review, I found myself standing on the steps of the gallery in the International Center of Photography in New York City amidst my co-finalists in the Dom Pérignon-Karl Lagerfeld ‘A Bottle Named Desire’ Photography Competition waiting to hear the finalists names be called. It was incredible to me that I made it that far. Not because I didn’t think my three Dom Pérignon Abstracts were good but because the abstract and digital nature of my images seemed like they might be a long shot, or at the very least a real challenge for people to see as “photography,” which is something I hadn’t really considered when I designed them.
Winning the competition was arguably the best and worst way I could have started my burgeoning photography career. On the one hand, winning anything is totally awesome. On the other it can set the bar a little unrealistically high particularly when you're just starting out. Amidst the champagne fueled hurly bury that followed my win as I stood on the stairs in the middle of gallery being blinded by camera flashes, I fielded questions about my work and fended off unsolicited suggestions about my future as well as the smattering of indecorous nay sayers, I allowed myself to relish in the moment and think for one hot second, “shit, I could really do this”.
It was easy to dream about my future life as a professional photographer but not so easy to realize it. Starting out in the world as a photographer was very different from the path laid out for me as an undergraduate Spanish major. Unlike being a teacher and outside the paradigm of the traditional 9-5 there was no entry level path for me to follow into a full time position. Neither were there any sage words of advice that could ever fully prepare me for starting out in the “real” world, much less as someone who is self employed, and even less so as someone who aspired to be a successful creative professional.
My first “real” job fresh out of photo school was a temp job in the donations department of a local hospital. I started in late May of 2006, a few weeks after graduation, and I immediately knew it wasn’t going to work when the office manager who was giving me a tour, asked if I was positive I knew how to alphabetize. She directed me to a workstation where, with an indifferent flick of her wrist, she told me I was supposed to sit all day pressing buttons like a LOST reject and I realized that job was not a good fit for me. My co-workers didn’t seem to mind any part of it. They didn’t mind sitting all day, the lack of sunlight, the subtle nodes of onions and tuna fish that wafted through the office, or the fact that the department managers disembodied dentures spent the entire day smiling down at us from a glass on the side of her desk. I only stayed at that job for one week. It was one horrible week during which I had all my keystrokes counted, trips to the bathroom clocked and had to listen to the same five songs on rotate ALL. FUCKING. DAY. By the 6th time “Promiscuous Girl” looped around I had already “gone to the bathroom” every hour and a half or so just to stand up and walk around until the department manager pulled me aside and said, “bathroom breaks are fine as long as you really have to go.”
The reality is there is much more to being a professional than having business cards, a social media presence and a website. While all are helpful tools, none are any more a measure of professionalism or eventual success, than getting a bike means you’re going to be an olympic athlete or will win the Tour de France. What people don’t tell you about being a creative professional, or at least trying to be one, is that it isn’t enough just to be creative. It isn’t enough to have a passion for something, to pursue it, to go to school for it, or to just be good at whatever it is you do. The reality is it isn’t even enough to have money to fall back on or connections to help you get started, although that can definitely help you get your foot in the door.
When I wasn’t working, I was hustling to try and find work or trying to think of new places I could look for work in between the administrative temp jobs I took to keep a roof over my head and pay down my debts. In my downtime I expanded and improved my portfolios. I contacted local newspapers, magazines and photo editors. I met with other photographers and I sat for a couple of portfolio reviews. I also participated in a few competitions, and I even managed to have a couple very small shows. I all but carpet bombed the Greater Boston area with promotional materials, emails, portfolios, resumes and phone calls which eventually resulted in a couple of interviews and a handful of inquiries even though I was never quite what they were looking for.
Eventually, and very slowly, work started to trickle in. As a neophyte I took pretty much every job that was thrown at me. The way I saw it I had to and I was better off busy than bored. I took super small jobs and I did trade-for-prints. I worked for food and exposure. I freelanced, I worked as a Teaching Assistant and I volunteered as a photographer at local film festivals, non-profits and a couple of schools. None of those jobs were fantastic but none of them were awful either and ultimately it was all par for the course. Even if at times I was just barely “making it” and surviving very carefully off of credit cards, coffee and ramen, I was still surviving and that was a major win in my book.
Look, life is not a straight line and everyone’s path is going to be a little bit different. There are going to be successes and failures and everyone is going to hit different milestones at different times, and some milestones might get missed altogether. It’s all okay. Don’t worry about that. Just as long as you can keep going forward, you’re doing good.
The thing about “making it” is that you have to decide what “making it” means for you. For some people it means having the stability of a regular paycheck at a 9-5 job. For others it means going viral on social media or it might mean trying to survive on wine and love. While for others still, it doesn’t matter how they pay the bills, just so long as they also have the time to be able to do what they love while scratching out an existence. Regardless of what you decide to do it is all fine, because the reality is “the rules” are arbitrary and we’re all just making it up as we go along.
However unlikely it might be that all who set out to “make it,” will be able to make a living only doing their art, or become the next “big thing” it is important to remember that it doesn’t mean you don’t have the ability to produce amazing work, nor does it mean that you don’t have something important to contribute to the contemporary narrative, and above all it certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep creating, or shouldn’t keep reaching for that star. What it does mean is that you need to be patient with your self, diligent in your pursuits, constant in your learning, and in the words of Corita Kent, “You have to kind of trust in the process that anything you do, can and will have possibilities.”