Did you know that I was an award winning professional photographer for almost 20 years? That I was a finalist for Photographic Artist of the Year in Canada? That I have sold photographic works as fine art as well as provided photography services for clients around the world?
No? I’m not surprised. I had kind of forgotten about that part of my creative voice while I’ve been focusing on creating trainings and community to support other freelancers.
And then….I got a request for an interview where the host wanted to talk about some of my images.
Specifically, she wanted to me to bring three images for us to talk about together that represented who I was as a photographer.
My Creative Voice
Three images? Three images? I opened up my Lightroom catalog to see 144,000 selects and my closest with shelves of slides and negatives. How was I ever going to choose which of the hundreds of thousands of images to represent my creative voice?
Where does one even start with something like this?
Finding My Voice
Like anything else, I started with getting really clear. Clarity on what does my creative voice look like now.
Who I was as an image maker in the early 2000’s and the kinds of creativity that lit me up then is not the same as the images I respond to today.
When I was a working photographer, I would have chosen images that I thought could impress future clients or help me attract dream projects. I would have played it safe and tried to squeeze my creativity into my ‘brand voice’. This time….I was free to choose without constraint.
So…what does my creative voice look like and which images did I choose?
My Creative Evolution
It has been 6 years since I retired my camera as my primary creativity tool. Still, I have a pretty good Lightroom organization system and my negatives and slides are fairly easy to access and filter out the ‘faves’. Even after filtering for the 4 stars and above, there were still way too many different types of images to choose from.
Looking back at them all, I was able to see the path of my creativity journey from a perspective of time that I had never experienced before.
I got to see the wild creativity and untamed passion for photography of any kind that sparked the beginning of my career. Things like shooting cross-processed slide film and figure models in juxtaposition to their environments.
And then, how my fascination for details evolved into a fascination for negative space, low horizon lines, and solitary figures.
This time, I was less focussed on highlighting client work and more interested in finding the three gems that could stand as examples for decades of self expression.
Choosing My Creative Voice
I’ve always found the choosing of images to be challenging. Mostly because I’m would be trying to read my client’s mind and select the best images from the session to fulfill the creative brief. Often, the images that filled the brief weren’t my favourite images.
This time, I got to choose just for me. And…I couldn’t just choose three. I chose six images – none of them were client work. (Okay, the one portrait of my mom who is a working actor and was done as part of headshot session for her but it wasn’t one of her selects.)
Here’s what I chose. You’ll have to watch the interview to find out the full story behind why I chose each one (coming out in a couple of months).
