I recently took up photography. It’s a hobby I’ve wanted to try for a very long time, both as an art history nerd and because of how much Life Is Strange I played as a teenager. More recently, I wanted to capture what all I see while traveling, and my phone camera wasn’t cutting it. That’s a somewhat vague origin story, but as I recently found myself with immediate access to one of the best art schools in the country, I finally gave the medium a shot. I signed up for Introduction to Digital Photography (one of the Adult Continuing Education classes at SAIC), bought a camera, and tried something new.

The class was structured around two critiques, where our work was very officially pinned to the wall and (constructively) criticized. I go to an art school, so I’ve attended a fair few of these, but it’s never been my own art there on the wall. Creative writing critiques are comparatively unintimidating, where everyone’s looking down at your words on a page. These first images had to fit certain genres (cityscape, interior, still-life, and one of our own choosing):

From top left: Chicago Blues Are Blocking My Starlight, Proof That I Once Stood Here, Interior Mooshroom, Please Forget Your Life In My Life

I consider myself a creative person, and I think I’ve settled into the outlets I normally turn to with writing and journaling. They’ve become familiar. There’s a lot of value in that, but this process of exploring the city and arranging compositions reminded me of the value of friction in creativity, of the effort it takes to find a completely new way of creating. Each of these was an experiment. I was (and kinda still am) a newbie to aperture settings and color-grading and every technical skill that comes with this hobby. WordPress also isn’t built for sharing photography, so forgive me if these don’t quite look right.

The still-life (Please Forget Your Life in My Life), saw me and my friend Lily arrange our trinkets into its own kind of dual-self-portrait. It was this portrait-through-objects that inspired my series for our second critique:

From top left: Be Seeing You, The Number of Hours We Have Together Is Actually Not So Large, Instead of Just Leaving, Please Forget Your Life In My Life

The highest praise I received for these came from a fellow classmate, who said “I see a storyteller who has a lot to express through art.” That’s the whole goal here. I didn’t expect still-life to be the genre that ran away with me, but I also shouldn’t have been surprised. I’m a museum curator, telling stories through objects is my whole thing. Here, those stories come from items I inherited from my grandfather, my family’s watches, and a few drawings my friend Elliot has given me over the years. I included Please Forget Your Life In My Life again in this series, though I figured out how to use Lightroom well enough to fix the lighting. Much of the text in this series comes from Mikko Harvey’s poem For M, which also got me thinking about the objects we leave behind in each other’s lives in the first place.

Finding new passions is not half as hard as being seen pursuing them. It’s a mix of reasons why this is. Part of it is a recent era of “effort to make it look effortless” that’s been floating around social media, where no one seems to share a project until it’s finished and beyond reproach. Sometime recently, visible effort became cringe; being an enthusiast can be misconstrued as being a try-hard. On the other hand, being new at something is vulnerable. Sharing these photos is a little embarrassing, even as I am incredibly proud of them, just for the fact of showing off a skill I’m not yet fluent in. The only way to really get better at something is to let yourself be critiqued, to reveal your work to the world and let yourself be pointed in the right direction. The only way out of the amateur stage is through. That isn’t easy for me, a perfectionist who also kinda hates showing off projects until they’re (theoretically) beyond reproach, but the benefits here outweigh the costs. This is a passion I want to pursue, so I’m finding the courage to share it. Thanks for being here with me.