Growing up as a military kid, I had the uncommon experience of getting to stay in one place for my entire teenage years. I say I grew up in Hawaii because, age 10 to 18 was spent there. Those are the years of our childhood that I think are the most important to forming who we become.
That said, my first 10 years on this earth were spent moving from place to place, and despite staying in Hawaii for 8 years, we always had this sense that it could change at any moment. While we were there, it was never a guarantee that we could stay, it just worked out that way. Every two years we braced ourselves for a possible change.
That feeling keeps you from getting too comfortable in a place. We had a decent community, but still, it’s always hard to invest when you know you’ll have to leave the community you get deep into. This is, of course, the period of time when I picked up a camera.
Despite me going off and becoming an adult on my own life schedule, I still felt like there was an impending change that would blow me somewhere else. The government was responsible for that in my childhood, now as an adult, I’m not really sure what it was. Maybe it was my insecurity in who I was and what I wanted to do. This feeling kept me from getting too too deep into a community in Chattanooga, despite living there for 8 years.
I finally relaxed a bit when moving to a small town in South Carolina. If I was going to move from Chattanooga, I wanted to finally build a home base. I wanted to know what that was like. I was an outsider that desperately wanted to finally become an insider. And photography would help me with that.
I’m in year 5, and I feel like I’ve started to be part of the community where I live. The Small Town Photo Project has been helpful because I feel like I can provide some value despite me coming from elsewhere.
Fitting in is overrated. When I first moved to South Carolina, a friend brought me to a barn in the middle of nowhere where a “chicken auction” was taking place. I had always bought chicken from a grocery store at a set price, so I didn’t get why on earth anyone would take time on a Tuesday night to try to get a better deal.
That’s not what a chicken auction is, it’s where people who raise chickens on their land get chickens…among other things. I walked into this barn, past the snack bar where you could get a T-Bone steak to eat in the movie theater style seating as you watched others bid or waited to bid yourself. We sat in our seats (I skipped the T—bone this time around) as the auctioneer rapidly began auctioning off whatever he pulled out of a crate he was handed. He was surrounded by crates, and I remember thinking that this was about to be a long night based on the piles of rattling crates he was surrounded by. Once I got settled in, however, I could have been there all night long.
An assistant would hand the auctioneer a random crate and he would blindly stick his hand in. Amongst the creatures he pulled out were rabbits, ducks, geese, and of course chickens. Apparently, it’s a common hustle for teenagers to catch geese and ducks from ponds in the area and try to make money auctioning them off. There were also some pretty aggressive roosters that got many eager bids, and I’m not going to speculate on why that is.
But I will tell you, I never felt like more of an outsider in my life.
Being a “fish out of water” is a super common experience for me. I stand in the aquarium of life looking through the glass at all the fish that “belong”.
What I’ve learned, however, is that no one really feels like they belong. The distinction is more between blending in and not blending in. Once I learned that, I kind of quit caring quite as much. Not blending in is actually a huge benefit.
Photographers are all outsiders in some way. We are looking at life at a distance, rather than being part of it. Maybe it’s healthy, maybe not, but it’s hard to be a good photographer if you’re part of the crowd as well. Photography is people-watching at the airport. Photographers live on the outside of life. We are students of life, but much like perma-academics, we are cursed to never actually live.
Now that I’ve started a family, I’ve really had to start learning how to be in the mix of things. I can take pictures of my family and document, but they are fully aware of when I’m not actually there.
In 2023, my goal has been to get better at the sales aspect of my business of hanging my artwork in commercial spaces. As this business grows, I’ve asked myself, why aren’t more photographers doing the same thing I am? My conclusion has just been that most photographers absolutely suck at sales and marketing, because if I can do it, a monkey can. But instead of just ending my thoughts at “photographers sucking”, I’m wondering if there’s a connection between the voyerism of photography and the difficulty to build business relationships. We are safe behind the camera, no one can hurt us there. When I walk around taking pictures of architecture in a small town while listening to a podcast or music, it feels like a warm blanket.
The type of person that is really good at photography I think feels more comfortable behind the camera than anywhere else, and the type of person who is really good at building relationships uses cameras as more of a tool in their toolbelt rather than a lifeline of some kind. That’s an oversimplification, but I’d say is half-baked theory. Maybe even three quarters baked.
I knew when starting the year, if I want to get better at sales, I’m going to have to take a bite out of my creative output. There’s just no way around it. Maybe that’s an admission of how deeply I believe this theory: I can’t do both at the same time. It’s the Ron Swanson idea of how to live: “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.” I catch myself all the time in the “half-assing two things” camp.
This year has started with its foot on the floor. I’m pretty deep into the “life” end of things right now between home ownership problems to fix, business fires to put out, time management to master, and so on and so forth. And while I think everything is going in the right direction, it gets me yearning for when I get grab my camera and get on the outside again.