What Does Your Photography Mean to You?
September 2, 2024
On my way south from the Yukon in the fall of 2022, Rachel Ross (an awesome photographer and person) very kindly let me stay in her apartment in Canmore for a couple weeks. I drew a lot of inspiration from talking to her. She also had a book in her apartment called Photo Therapy Motivation and Wisdom by Rick Sammon. This book spoke to me in a number of ways, and came at a good time as I was beginning to process my experiences and edit my photos from the last few months all over Alaska and Canada. One exercise suggested in the book is to answer the question, “what does your photography mean to you?” The author describes the same exercise here too.
What does my photography mean to me? This was my answer at the time, and feels just as accurate today:
It’s an expression of harmony between gentleness and power, between sensualness and rigidity. It’s a way of communing with this in nature and cultivating (or simply recognizing) it in myself. It brings me to places and moments and experiences that I would not otherwise go or even know existed. It puts me in touch with an incomprehensible beauty of existence that has profoundly changed the course of my life and opened doors to parts of myself that I may never have found otherwise. It gives me an outlet for creativity and expressiveness. It provides motivation to live instead of exist. To train and use my body and get after it in the mountains in service of creating beautiful art that I’m proud of. It’s a way of connecting with other people. I can show them my photos and speak to them in an immediate way and maybe move something within them. I also became a lot more socially adept when I began doing solo photography adventures because, resulting from these trips, I knew I had everything in me I already needed and could seek to connect and uplift rather than seek validation in social interactions. Photography can be a healthy escape from time to time if I’m otherwise unhappy. I’ve met a ton of awesome people and had lots of awesome travel experiences because of photography. It has been the catalyst for almost all of the really profound experiences I’ve had, such as hiking for 24 hours straight or sharing a strip of beach along the gulf of Alaska with a grizzly bear, and the tremendous amount of growth that has often followed these experiences. It has naturally caused me to spend a whole lot of time with myself. It has by complete accident given me a path to liberation from an unhappy childhood. It makes me far more attuned to the world around me every day. It’s incredibly fun! And perhaps it will make me a living too, and perhaps even simultaneously provide a platform to have a positive impact on lots and lots of other people.
If you enjoy photography, there is probably a great answer of your own lying within you. See what happens if you give expression to it in words. For me, doing this exercise gave me a lot of clarity and compelled me to double down on this path that had already given me so much.