*drum roll*
I have a brand new website! 🎉
Way back in February I booked the incomparable, Made By Zoë, and we spent most of this summer working together (and separately) on building a space I can call my own.
I’ve had a professional domain since college, but I never invested in a web designer until now. Mostly because web design is an expensive investment, but also because working with another freelancer was incredibly daunting to me. I’m an independent person, in business and my personal life, and I’ve run my business on my own for almost half my life now…so it was terrifying to invite somebody into that space.
But I needn’t have worried. Zoë is a superstar sweetheart.
I thought I knew what I wanted going in, and I thought it would be a simple process where Zoë just threw designs at me, bing bang boom, but it turned out being much more intimate and vulnerable than I expected. I had to sit with a lot of questions. I had to face myself head on. And through it all, Zoë did a fantastic job just listening and prodding.
(In our first meeting she asked me where I saw myself in ten years and I almost threw up. 2035 is not a real year!!)
At the end of it all, I finally figured out what I want to spend my time doing as a freelancer. Prioritizing sliding scale and reduced rate clients has always been important to me, and it has taken on greater importance in the last few years. But more than that, I want to prioritize PLAY. Documenting can be high art and fine art and truly breath-taking consistency, but I just like getting my hands dirty. Experimenting, if you will. And I’m still trying to figure out how to be confident in my craft even though I’ve been doing this for almost half my life.
I’ll never be a typical freelancer, probably because I’m too neurodivergent for that. I don’t have a niche. I’m a jack of all trades, master of joy kind of person. I like trying new things. It’s how I shot a heavy metal music video in a dojo. And that means I need to accept that I won’t be the kind of person who shoots twenty high-end weddings a year. Sorry.
But it’s almost like, now that I’ve accepted I’m only doing part-time freelancing, now that I’m digging into film and I tote six cameras around at any given time, now that I’m investing in queer couples with lower budgets…I feel more like myself than I ever have. I finally feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be.
I spent most of this year combing through thousands of archived images from the last fifteen years of my life. College photoshoots, my short-stint as a book influencer, time spent traveling to see friends across the country. Falling back in love with film. A global pandemic. Finding myself over and over and over again.
And what I noticed is that we spend so much time looking forward. We are always moving on to the next shoot, the next wedding, the next client, and with the way social media is going, there isn’t time to sit with our past works. We don’t leave space to appreciate how far we’ve come. We don’t have a place where we can point and say, can you believe that’s what I made six years ago? All the places we used to do that are different now. We “archive” everything or delete everything or fail to go back to the posts we made that were more than one year ago. And it’s stupid. Because I’ve taken a lot of fucking photos. And I LOVE LOOKING AT THEM!
My best friend made fun of me when I texted her last week saying I was still adding images to my archives, because both of us know that I’m the only person who’ll be looking at my website in the long term, and she wondered if it was really worth all the work I was doing. (I don’t even know how to quantify all the hours I spent building these galleries. It has to be in the hundreds.) And yeah, it’s a bit overboard, and sure, I’m the only person who cares, but I do care. Even if it’s just for me, that’s one person. That’s enough.
And I cannot stress how much fun I had building this site. Zoë did the heavy lifting on the main pages (Home, About, Services) and it looks incredible (she’s a WIZARD), but I built the Archives myself. It was a wonderful walk down memory lane, and it feels like I’m honoring not only the past versions of myself, but all the people I love. All the clients I’ve had. All the families I’ve documented and watched grow. All the friends I’ve had the honor of walking alongside. I felt like I remembered a piece of myself that got lost in 2020 when everything died. I reopened a door I shut to survive.
It feels stupid to advertise my business and my silly photos. For someone who is a Leo Rising I really am so uncomfortable being the center of attention and putting myself out there.
And also…the world’s on fire.
But this process has made me realize that yeah, I am actually really fucking proud of where I am today. I’m thirty years old, I’ve had my own freelance business for twelve years, and I get the privilege of shooting film and digital photos for MONEY.
When I was sixteen, this was everything I wanted. My own business, my own beautiful website, and the gift of being hired to create art.
And when I look through all the images I have in my archives, in the folders of my computer that live outside the internet, I am reminded of just how lucky I truly am. That even if nobody ever hires me again, and even if nobody but my mom and dad and best friends look through my new website, I lived my dream. I am living the dream.
And I am so incredibly grateful to Zoë for getting me here. Truly none of this would be possible without her skills or her questionnaires or her help. She’s inspired a lot of my year and changed the way I see myself and my art, and I just feel so lucky to have found her!!
Invest in your art and your joy and your whims because often they will enrich your life in ways you can’t even imagine.
…
Anyway.
Please check out my website1 on your DESKTOP COMPUTER. Get off the damn phone. And go follow Zoë because her work is exquisite and she’s fantastic.
(And yes, all the handwriting on my website is, in fact, mine!)
