​

Type something

Finding Photography

I am grateful every day that cameras let me keep a history I have no other way to hold. I’ve been around them all my life, of course – a dinky chrome point-and-shoot or two to bridge the eventual gap to iPods and phones growing eyes. The proper courtship, though, began much later as a way to get me far from my desk. I had moved nine hundred miles southwest, chasing an MFA in Poetry, and I knew if I kept staring at the wall behind my keyboard, I would burn out before the paint-splotched lightbulb. 

A coworker told me about buying junk cameras from Goodwill’s website, and in a few weeks, I was taking the hand of any fix-up-an-SLR YouTube tutorial that would have me. With a toothpick and a screwdriver, I begged a machine more than twice my age to come back to life. Sometimes, it did.

Since then, I have brought cameras up mountains and through caves. I’ve shot East and West Coast skies. I've filled walls and albums with my prints. I have silver prints of buildings that are now gone, and of course, somewhere in a drawer sits a stack of developed negatives from rolls I found already exposed. So much of what I’ve come to love has been unexpected. Impossible to predict. I think that's why I keep doing it - more than any other time in my life, I feel like I choose the memories I make. I try to be ready for them.