I’ve always been a photographer, I think. My mom was one, and I have boxes and boxes of her slides to go through of her trips to Europe in the 50s, Niagara Falls on her honeymoon, and around the country. As a child, I planned out my Barbies’ wedding, and took all their formal posed shots against the background of our garden, and remember taking a old Kodak Instamatic with me to sleepaway camp, taking pictures of my fellow campers and my teddy bear. I took a photography class in high school, and had to traipse through the convent to get to the darkroom, where I developed a bunch of pictures of the boy I had a crush on (having seen him play basketball at the park maybe twice, but never spoken to). From college, I had albums and albums of photos on a Canon Powershot from cast parties and theme parties, football games and campus antics. After college, I went to Europe myself, and documented late nights in Trafalgar Square, early morning channel crossings, rocky beach adventures, and backstage antics with the cast of Riverdance. I came home to New York, and worked an entry level job in publishing, got my first apartment in the city, and worked for three summers at the New York Renaissance Faire, recording each moment I could non-anachronistically have a camera in my hand. As my niece and nephew were born, I took pictures at our family beach house and on the Jersey Shore, at Christmas parties and holiday gatherings. I documented my first dates with my now-husband digitally, each a special occasion that warranted a new folder on my hard drive — Denver, January 2006; New York, March 2006; our first trip to Prague, our first Christmas together, the first time he faced my entire Irish Catholic extended family and lived to tell about it.
When we got married, my big budget items were a live swing band to dance to (they’d been playing at the club when he proposed), and a photographer. We took vacations together, traveled together, built our lives together, and I took pictures and blogged about it. In 2010, I did my first P365, bought my first DSLR, and was able to share photos throughout my first successful pregnancy (my first miscarriage was also in my pictures, in the moments I didn’t talk about, but can see in the photos of that glass of sprite in front of me at our friends’ wedding, and the non-existent bump that never was on the anniversary of our honeymoon). When my son was born, my passion exploded — 3,000 photos his first year, 9,000 the next, and more each year since. There wasn’t that second child drop-off in documenting that came with my daughter — over 13,000 pictures still live on my hard drive for her first year.
Now, 44 years into this obsession (ok, probably less. I mean, I wasn’t *born* with a camera in my hand), I am a photographer to document our lives, to preserve our memories, to freeze moments like these, and to remember what’s come before: my parents, both gone now, who live in framed photos in my bedroom, still young and happy and together, as they are again now after many years apart; my babies, barely recognizable in the maturing faces of my kids; the hounds we’ve loved and lost; my hot, thin, single days in the city; and a million more moments, captured on film or digital, printed or living in frequently referenced files on my computer.
This is why I’m a photographer.
