Year of No Fear: Photography
Continuing my Year of No Fear series, I’d like to talk about photography. My grandfather was a photographer who had his own darkroom. I didn’t know it until I began studying photography and darkroom work in college. I remember feeling amazed that he’d done the same things I was doing; that it was maybe in our blood. I’d wanted to pair photography with my Journalism major, to make me more marketable (“hey, I can write and take my own photos!”). However, I ended up learning fine art photography instead. I absolutely loved every minute — from the shooting, to the developing of the film, to printing my own enlargements. It was like magic, really — you have a blank sheet of photo paper that turns into something beautiful instead. I will always love darkroom the most, no matter what I do. It’s where my artistic soul feels most at home. Unfortunately, I’ve had to put my darkroom stuff on hold due to several different factors. (I knew that once I’d graduated from college, I would no longer have access to a darkroom. My fiancé at the time had his own darkroom and I thought, maybe I can do this. It took a lot of time, a lot of work, and a bit of magic, but my dad, my ex-husband, and I made it happen. To this day I still marvel at it. We had no contractor but managed to move an entire wall to create a little “room” for me).