February 7, 2024
At the time I'm writing this, I have 4 photos chosen for an exhibit in Barcelona, Spain. At least 1 photo has been chosen to be published on 121clicks, an online photography magazine. I have qualified for an exhibit in Mexico City, but am waiting to know which photos are chosen. I am very close to qualifying for 4 other exhibition or publication contests, including one at The Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago later in 2024.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend my art gallery debut in person. I have never had a passport, and even though I have always wanted to get one, it has been a low priority. Traveling outside of the U.S. is very expensive and even though I could afford a passport, I couldn't afford to do anything with it. So I've never bothered spending the money to get something I may never have the opportunity to use.
I had known for the majority of the last week that I had qualified for the exhibition. I assumed that I would probably be featured in the digital portion of the exhibit, as only 40 photos were selected to be displayed as prints in the gallery for the weekend.
It was an exciting week, knowing that something big was on the way. Having an idea of what that big thing was helped me keep my cool about it. I had a great photo and the others were widely accepted as pretty good. That was the conclusion I had come to by the end of the contest.
Boy was I wrong about that, and in every kind of good way.
Heading into Monday morning for my time zone, the chosen photos for the Barcelona exhibit were announced from Europe. I was asleep at the time.
On Monday morning I woke up to find out that all four of my entered photos had been chosen to be part of the digital features at the exhibit.
I didn't just have a good photo. I had a bunch of good photos.
I had already worked around the clock all weekend to have the prints ready to sell when I announced my spot in the exhibit. Fortunately, it didn't take a lot of effort to add a small banner to each product saying that it was featured in Barcelona, Spain.
The next thing I had to do on Monday was go get a tooth pulled. Much less exciting, and much less fun.
The dissonance of what was happening was astounding. In one 12-hour period I had learned that I was really making my photos go places with these contests, and I also had to deal with a weird kind of grief and loss about my own body and self. I lost my tooth primarily because it just wasn't a very good tooth. It had already come in stunted and odd from the beginning, and ended up with a defect deep in the root that caused problems that couldn't be fixed. It had to go. Fortunately, you can't really tell most of the time, but it was still a very dramatic swing in emotions from where the morning started.
Ultimately, I still don't really know how to react to all of this. I feel very excited and humbled. I am very grateful that I have found this opportunity to share my work. Mostly, though, I am just focused. I'm focused on continuing this work and what I am doing here on the website. I love making this blog, even if it is still a bit inconsistent right now while I get the whole place up and running. With so much success, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to make this my main job.
Considering the art projects I have worked on in the past, this is by far my most successful venture. It was a lot of seemingly "overnight" success for me with the contests and exhibits, but it was actually a long-time coming. As I've mentioned in other blog posts, I have been taking photos as an amateur for a long time now. Even when I was a kid, before any of the "amateur decade" I currently claim, I was taking photos and trying to get cool ones that I really liked. Every time I got my hands on a disposable film camera as a kid I was ecstatic. Trying to figure out how exactly to use those 24 exposures on the roll was always a great adventure, and inevitably resulted in a total loss of the film strip because there was never a single good picture. Not that I am particularly critical of a 6 or 7 year old me not understanding framing or lighting techniques, but they were photos that came from a child with a toy, for sure.
Since High School and College I have nearly constantly been working on art projects of one form or another. Whether theater, visual arts, music, digital artwork, and of course, the photography, too, I was involved in anything that I could be that involved expression and creativity. It is my calling and always has been.
I didn't know I was practicing all that time. I never considered photography as a serious form for my art to take until recently. But practicing, it was. For years and years. As I continue to organize and go through old photos I haven't seen since I took them, I'm discovering that I've been slowly getting to this point for a long time now.
Nothing about what is happening right now is an overnight success. It was almost two decades of constant, steady work. It involved understanding so many other aspects of art and creativity and expression for me to be this talented right now.
One of my chosen photos was taken almost ten years ago. I was surprised I even still had it after all this time. It existed still sitting in a folder on my cloud drive. It got edited in Lightroom for the first time, 9 years later. The results are stunning, even today in 2024.
I've been at this for a long time, learning how to market myself and how to make my art and express it in a way that others can continue to enjoy for a long time. That's my goal. I want to capture the beauty and the details and the moments of the world, and I want to share those so you can get as much enjoyment out of them as I do. Thanks for reading this, for supporting my work, and for supporting the arts in general. This is all happening very fast for me right now, but after the slow build up of my life, it feels like things finally falling into place. Thank you for that <3
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