Photographs, Collages, & Paper Heart Doilies
on how a past life with photo taught me how to protect my creative heart
Dear Friends,
Unless you’ve known me since the aughts, you might not know that I majored in photography in college. I’d actually started out with photo a bit earlier—at a public school during my teenage years. It was an old name and a new building, united through some impressive philanthropic funding. When the school had been rebuilt as a partial magnet program in the arts, a fairly substantial darkroom was added to our visual arts building.
By the time I was sixteen I was fully submerged in the vanilla-scented stop bath: I knew how to develop all my own film and photos; how to burn and dodge to create dramatic prints; how to use my mother’s old Minolta camera to take the composition I imagined in my mind’s eye.
Photography permitted me a means to capture the X-Y axis where the reality I saw met the fantasies I’d imagined. I owe a lot to photography—mostly because it gave me a purpose past high school. I was often bored in school and didn’t really see the point of college, but I knew that there was a spark within me and going on to art school would help me find some meaning in my life. Thus, I went.
I was a pretty diligent photo major, compared to my high school self. I had a few run-ins with scholastic failure and felt I had a lot to prove to myself and those who had witnessed my prior teenage mistakes. I was enthusiastic about the work I was doing, and I was always coming up with pie-in-the-sky concepts that my fellow art school friends were patient enough to go along with and model for (e.g.: trying to take a perfectly white-balanced color photo by coating a friend completely in flour set against a white backdrop).
The core of this was: I loved making art, and I still do.
The problem was: very few photographers go on to be working artists.
Although I haven’t necessarily kept in touch with my fellow photo major peers from back in the day, I’m pretty sure none of the people in my cohort ended up going on to be a fine arts photographer. Sure, there are people I went to college with who ended up using their skills to be professional image retouchers or lighting techs or assistants to big-name artists in NYC—but to holistically be living off your art—hmm.
It was around my third year of college when I realized I didn’t want to be working in any of those roles, and the halcyon days of art-making off of student loans would soon end. Graduation was quickly approaching and the illusion of protected time was beginning to shatter into the reality that if I wanted to continue photography, I was most likely going to have to get a job as a studio assistant or retoucher. That, or continue working part-time jobs while making art on the side and fight for my life to try and get my work into galleries. In terms of income, I only knew how to work in retail, and the thought of folding t-shirts after college while moonlighting as an artist had less of an appeal than getting a full-time job in the industry.
I was also slowly getting exhausted with myself because school had trained me that every new photo I took must be a part of well-executed series or project. Gone were the days of fifteen-year-old me walking around the neighborhood with my Minolta, shooting black-and-white photos of cemeteries and strangers. I was suddenly in a space where I was expected to continuously produce the type of work I could put in a portfolio and present to galleries. I felt the pressure of my future each day I woke up. I was somehow existing in this space where every aspect of my identity was photographer, but it was something I no longer wanted to be—but I didn’t know how to reconcile that after eight years of high school and college combined.
The short of it is: I did end up moving to NYC for a paid internship following my graduation, but eight or nine months later I pivoted into the not-for-profit world to an entirely different line of work (and pivoted at least 2 or 3 more times before I ended up teaching in higher ed). After that initial photo gig in NYC, I gave up photography completely. As of 2023, it’s been probably 15 years since I shot a roll of film.
There are so many other aspects to why I ultimately left photography behind soon after graduating: personal illness while in school; never truly feeling like I had a mentor; a growing interest in creative writing over visual art; a hostile internship; not feeling like I had the tools to pursue being a professional artist alone. At the core though, I had entered into art-making in a time in my life when everything was touched with magic, and that honeymoon phase had long ended.
I didn’t know what to do when the magic was gone.
When you’re a young person who has never felt in control of your life and suddenly you can create images—it feels powerful. The only problem was…I had taken this path into college and was expected to do something professionally with this degree upon graduation to earn myself a living wage. I had indulged in this fantasy that art-making would be enough to get by in a society that values capital and commodity before anything else.
The moral of this story isn’t about giving up though—it’s about transformation.
I conflated the production of my photos with my ability to earn an income because I didn’t have the time or experience past college to extricate those ideas yet. And graduating right as the Great Recession began made it harder to untangle my ideas about work—especially when the generation that taught me kept dishing out print-out-your-résumé-and-walk-in-and-give-a-firm-handshake advice that was increasingly obsolete.
What I see as a brief moment of failure in my early twenties provided me an insight into my eventual world-view on what it means to be a working artist/writer. My dealings with the visual art world and photography taught me a lot about protecting my heart, and when a decade later I decided to return to school for an MFA in creative writing, I knew how to safeguard my writing and separate it from the weekday labor I do to earn an income. This is why my relationship with writing is a lot healthier and why doing an MFA never burned me out like it does so many others: I learned from my worst experiences in my younger years how to hold onto the art you love and keep the creative honeymoon going.
And even though I’m focused on my creative writing and teaching in the present, I don’t necessarily mean to suggest I’m done with photography forever. Even after all these years I still feel it may come back to me one day, and when that happens, I have a lot more knowledge and wisdom about what it means to separate your day-to-day income from your witch-hour artistic practice. Which is getting me so close to the actual point I set out to make…
Recently, I hosted a face-to-face hangout for one of my local writing groups. If you remember the old folk story “Stone Soup,” everyone brings a vegetable or two, throwing them into a pot of water to make a cauldron of soup that everyone can enjoy. With our “Palentine’s Day,” everyone brought a little bit: stickers, construction paper, crayons, markers, magazines, scissors, glue sticks, doilies, candy, cookies, seltzer… and we all ended up with enough supplies to make zines and collages with.
I loved just being around my friends and community where we could shoot the shit and scribble away while spending quality time with each other. My head was empty, and I had no grand plan about what I was going to do during our hangout session, but I ended up spending the entire time trying to create a collage on a single sheet of paper (what someone in our group called “maximalist”—a term I love!).
Yes, it is a very, very, very silly collage, but I ended up sticking it on my fridge for a couple different reasons, which brings me to the actual utterances I offer up to you today:
Find ways to be creative that have nothing to do with money, nothing to do with your main artistic practice, and nothing to do with ideas like “professionalism.”
When I completed my inane collage, I was proud to have finished something in a single sitting. It felt good to set aside some time where I wasn’t working, wasn’t teaching, wasn’t grading, wasn’t watching TV or movies, wasn’t playing video games, but was giving myself an outlet to be creative and exercise that muscle just for the sake of exercising it. I turned off the voice that would say something like, “You’re going to have to get a lot better at collaging if you want to open your Etsy store and sell prints!” I turned off the voice that wants to be interested in products, in commodity, in projects, in a series, in pictures of success.
(There is a time & place for that voice, but this is about encouraging a practice to try and to turn that voice off! I find playing around with another genre you’re “not good at” can help keep me humble & allow for play.)Find ways to protect your artist heart & embrace play when creating.
This one is certainly easier said than done. It’s taken me over a decade to get closer to this, and I still don’t always get it right, but I know my past life as an aspiring visual artist taught me a lot. When I am alone with myself and drafting on the page, I’m not the version of me who is promoting a story collection or hoping to win awards or that editorial-voice me who breaks out a protractor to measure each sentence. When I’m alone with me, I am playing. I am embracing that young teenage me who took a photo because they liked the quality of a light hitting a wall, who asked a stranger exiting the grocery if I could take her portrait because I loved the way her figure blended in with the environment of the gumball machines behind her. I turn off the voice that says “this isn’t good enough” or “this is your brand new, very serious project!” or “you’ll never be a professional working writer if you waste your time on this loser story.”
Creative writing is liquid. Words can be endlessly reshaped, rearranged. You don’t have to get it right the first time. You can create words just for you, that you end up showing no one. Although I realize I partially broke this pact by showing you all my just-for-me collage, I want you to know that I like having it on my fridge—at least for right now. It won’t be there forever, but I’m keeping it pinned there for now to remind myself that I need to slow down and make time for dalliances. I’m reminding myself that there will always be opportunities to present my writing to the world, but the first step is honoring my creative self who loves to experiment, play, make messes—and who has painfully learned how to separate the art one makes for themselves with the labor that goes into sharing it with everyone else.
I hope you can try to find some time to make some artistic messes just for yourself these next few weeks.
Yours,
JD
PS: Thanks to all the new subscribers. I’m glad my previous newsletter on sending work out to literary magazines resonated with so many of you. I don’t update this often, but I wanted to update it sooner rather than later since so many of you were kind enough to subscribe. If there are topics you’d like me to write more about, please leave a comment. Or, if you’ve read all of this, just say hi and introduce yourself!
A few things I might write about eventually: I’ve been thinking about talking about what literary citizenship means to me, how to run a reading series, share some syllabi of classes I’ve taught or plan to teach, and other topics related to publishing…. If there’s something you’d like to learn more about that you think I could reflect on in a newsletter, please let me know. XO.