How We Got Here

House In Pasture (Detail), Highway 81, Tennessee 2006

I was working on some new images from my last trip home (I grew up in East Tennessee) and began looking very deeply into the details of this image. As I looked at the stripes on the porch, the chair waiting to be saved, and considered the story that I had heard from a neighbor of this house, I began to wonder how we got here. More importantly I began to think about how I got here. Not how I got here physically or philosophically, but how I developed the want and the need to photograph the way I do (which may turn out to be philosophical). I looked at this and thought of other patterns that I have developed photographically compared this with the choices I have made in my personal life and asked "How Did I Get Here?"

I think as a photographer and an artist, this is a question that comes up more often than I notice. Only when I let it loose in this forum, to ask it to everyone who will listen, does it really become a force of a question. I believe that all of it is circumstantial. Yes, I do feel that I was meant to be creative, an artist. I know that to be true, it is in mine and so many others’ make up. The more interesting question is the how and why when it comes to media, subject, habit, pattern, obsession. All of these factors play into who we are and what we have and will become. All of us have choices to make and suddenly more choices. These choices lead us down paths and eventually roads.

I wouldn't change a thing. That chair looks relaxed on that porch, so should we all.