The beginning of a year is always a time of reflection, for me. I've been reflecting on my career, of late - looking back to help me plan forward, if you will :)

It's wild to me, that I've been serving people as a professional portrait photographer for almost two full decades now (even if you don’t count my early days of scrappy headshot sessions & bathroom darkroom prints for all of my dance friends.) I’m so grateful that I get to continue to use my craft to make a living. I love to serve people, and to show them beautiful sides of themselves they may not have been able to see before.

But for a long time, partly because of the focus it took to build a photography business, and partly because of an old story I needed to reframe, there was a big piece missing.

I longed to make work that was more than service, more than a pretty picture, and more meaningful - if not to anyone else, at least to me.

I longed (and still long) to make Art with a capital ‘A’. But admitting that has always felt a bit embarrassing or pretentious in some way. Our culture tells us over and over again that practicality is king and that art as a hobby is lovely and mildly interesting, but art as a job is unrealistic and not worth the risk. And also, you have to be a rare genius to succeed as an artist, so if you say out loud that you are pursuing art with a capital ‘A’, the “Who do you think you are?” voices (external OR internal) pipe up.

I didn’t worry about these things at all when I was young; I had huge aspirations and I trained seriously for a career in dance, believing that it was not only a possibility, but a sure thing as long as I worked really hard for it. 

Alas, I was wrong - it was not a sure thing (shocking, I know!) And when that reality hit, I was heartbroken, but young and resilient, and I just thought - ok keep moving forward, don’t look back. Art is no longer the path, that’s over for you, so find other ways to live your life. And I did.

And I'm grateful to say that I’ve loved my life all along. But I didn’t realize that the hole left there, in my heart, would refuse to be filled with other stuff. In fact, as I type this, maybe it wasn’t really a hole. Maybe it was a part of my heart that did not die as I thought it did with the loss of dance, but rather, was shut behind a big heavy door while I tried to pretend it didn’t exist anymore.

Cut to 25 years later, and it’s still scratching at the damn door. (Sounds haunting, right? It is!)

In recent years, I’ve decided to quiet my inner critics (the whole posse of them) and to allow myself to believe again. It’s so much harder than it was as a teenager to believe that a) it’s even possible to create art with a capital ‘A’ and b) it’s reasonable to pursue art. As a person in her 40s, though, I also realize that if the scratching at the door/the longing to make art hasn’t gone away by now, it never will and the only thing to do is to get over all the mental & emotional ick, and to get to work.

So that’s what I’m up to now. Not that you asked ;)

More about this whole artsy adventure, coming soon.