I know people like my funny entries, but this is a little more of a serious note...

It's always interesting when someone else tells you how your work ethic is. My response is usually caught between a laugh and an exclamation of "WTF?" But it so happened this week that someone informed me that because I have made no plans for photography to be my career and because I don't consider myself a "professional" that it only follows that I somehow don't take my photographic work seriously.

I've already responded to that individual, but I wanted to address here what photography means to me and how I feel about where I am now.

Photography was never my first love. It was not my second, or even third love. It was something I discovered because my father loved his medium format film camera and showed me how to use it. It wasn't something I was particularly interested in until I was 16 and took self portraits. I've never really thought much about my camera and the kind of photos I take with it. The individual who made the aforementioned comment remarked on how "sad" it was that I didn't consider myself talented. It's not that I don't consider myself "talented", but just that I don't think very much about it at all. Thoughts of how "good" I am don't cross my mind.

Perhaps I'm abnormal or was just raised differently, but there have always been more important things to me than obsessing over how good/bad I am at something. I'll confess that I actually flush and feel somewhat embarrassed when I happen upon my work in a forum and people compliment it. It's not that I don't feel worthy (indeed, I feel honoured and humbled) as much as I don't often spend time considering the worth of my work, or what it means to other people. I don't consider myself to be "unique" or "original" because that's not something I strive for. What's important to me is the aesthetics and the meaning involved in a photograph. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, but the meaning has to exist in some form for me.

I'm a storyteller. Writing and telling stories has, and always will be, my first love. Photography is another aspect of how I express emotion, but I could never make it into anything more than that. Sometimes I wonder if pursuing it as a career would take that value away from it. So it's not that I don't take my work seriously enough to pursue it as a career, but because I value it too much as a form of expression to risk it. Some people do just fine balancing their career and their art, but I will keep it separate in this manner because it's the right choice for me. And I'll keep "talent" out of my thoughts all together. The only thing that keeps photography fresh for me isn't through praise or reassurance of my ability, but through my affection for communicating stories and emotions. I don't need to acknowledge myself as a "professional" to keep that.