Reasons to be a Photographer
This is a difficult piece, and I’m not fully sure how to write about it. I’ll probably rewrite this blog several times, and it still won’t be right.
My then-boyfriend was a pack rat, and he had an extensive network of eccentric weirdos that enabled him with endless supply of rare oddities for him to pack. One day he decided to take ALL of his crafting supplies, dump them out on the livingroom floor, and “organize them.”
I wasn’t yet diagnosed with ADHD. I didn’t know why somethings caused a debilitating freeze responses. But I walked into what looked like ground zero for a bead bomb, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to cry and scream and burn the house down all at the same time. I sank into the couch for a good ten minutes trying to get a grip. And then I had a strangely calming thought: I had a camera.
I spent the next hour or so simply recording the items on my floor, perfectly framing them within the little box of a viewfinder. Containing it. I took items outside and arranged them nicely. I got inspired to create my own mess because I felt like I could handle it.
Later that semester, we were given a music video project for a class, which was the perfect home for all the footage I had of this day. My teacher commented about the irony of putting the song “Little Boxes,” a song about bland conformity, to images of chaotic creativity.
Not much later after that, the chaos that boyfriend brought into my life was too much for me to handle, and I left. Even later after that, his chaos became his end.
It’s been about eleven years since I made this video, ten years since we broke up, and five years since he died. In that time span, I’ve moved overseas and back again, learned a new language, gone through two new relationships, and survived a pandemic. I’ve dramatically had to start my life over twice. And I’m still finding corners of my life littered with bits of chaos he left behind, like moving boxes that I haven’t unpacked yet but can’t just throw away. And part of that is because that chaos isn’t just his, it’s also mine.
We had the same kind of chaos. I just learned how to compartmentalize my chaos so that it didn’t attract too much of the wrong attention. I became a photographer. I took the whole of myself and the whole of the world and made them meet in a single frame. It satisfies the internal drive to feel and connect with the external without being destructive (“destructive.”) He shouted his chaos from the rooftops; I rebranded mine as a career.
They say if you make a living doing what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s a lie. The only way to make a living is to make money, and, ina capitalist society, the only way to make money is to constantly be doing more than what is reasonable. As far as I can tell, happiness is a combination of dumb luck and constantly reminding yourself that it could always be worse. I don’t want to be a filmmaker or photographer. I don’t even think I want to make art, because it’s just a way to cope with not having value unless I can convince people that I do. It’s another box to put myself in. Artist. Photographer. It’s a box I have to choose because the alternative boxes would be literal boxes. Criminal. Dead.
