Despite never being exceptionally good at it, nor knowledgeable in a technical sense, photography has played a significant role in my life. At least, that's what I can say about my teens and twenties; "work" and "career" and "financial obligations sucking the creativity out of you by the intentional design of capitalism" have slowed that down in the last decade or so. Even still, I continue to take pictures of the world around me, whether when I intentionally bring a camera along, or using my phone as everyone does. In a way photography has lost some of its magic given how virtually everybody has a readily available tool to take decent snapshots at any point. It used to be that only dedicated people, such as myself, had a camera on them at all times.
My personal story of photography in my life will be detailed elsewhere, but a basic summary is that having a camera was to my social benefit as a teenager, then got me a job in university, which got me discounts and further enabled the habit. When the internet grew to the point that it cost nothing for social media to be built around sharing photos, and almost everyone had a smartphone with a decent camera within it, people started becoming leery of me taking photos of them, asking what I was going to do with it. In reality I've taken possibly a hundred thousand photos and posted merely a fraction of them. They have always meant something to me personally (hence a very large collection of ones I've printed), and I never desired a social media following or any level of influence close to influencers. My Instagram has been dormant for years; I haven't posted a photo to Facebook for decades, and I don't subject my fediverse friends to most pictures I take on a day-to-day basis. Instead I've decided to collect photos of different meanings to my life, and put some of them here for people to see as a collection.
The images on these pages aren't in any particular order aside from the vibes I felt at the time I put them up. They're always being added to, as time is always moving on, and the themes of these never really end. That is the beauty of photography to me, and why I always had some kind of camera on me since 1998. New pages will be made as I think of new collections, and the parts of my life that I feel are artistically significant. They're not personal in the sense of having identified people or specific places, but they're personal in what my values are and what expresses something within me in ways greater than words.