//caminante's photostream

hello everyone,

probably no one follows my stream anymore, and rightly so, especially since I took a year+ hiatus from maintaining my account. a lot has happened since then. during Fall '09, while I was a staff photographer at the Daily Texan, despite the amazing opportunities, I became extremely disillusioned with photography, and found that it was not necessarily the right career path for me. I became very disillusioned with a lot of things in my life that semester, but ended up coming into my own that year. I finally began pursuing my true passions and am about to graduate with a degree in Anthropology and Latin American Studies, with the aim of going to law school after a few years in the workforce.

among other amazing events that would occur and beautiful people I would meet, I had the life-changing experience of living, working, and studying in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for about 6 weeks this past summer. unfortunately, however, I did not take many photos that truly represent the city....only some casual snapshots in Zona Sul.

blah, blah, blah, what does that have to do with anything? well, I sincerely believe that photography will always have a major part to play in my life, no matter what I do, whether it be in law, projects, my writing, or personal life.

as I type this, I sincerely wonder why I gradually stopped taking photographs last year. maybe it was the general pessimism floating around the photojournalism community I experienced, from ace photojournalists no less. it was definitely the potential abuse of my own images, not being my own boss, working like a dog for things I felt didn't compensate for the amount of work, and other ethical questions within photojournalism...just the general world of journalism. and really, just the role I wanted to play in life. I didn't want to be stuck behind a camera, taking the photos instead of creating them with my own life.

and you can take that last sentence literally. you become such a robot sometimes, when you take photographs. you become one with the machine. you'll be taking photos of someone talking and miss the whole conversation. you'll be taking photos and not be able to experience something more fully....I can ramble on and on about why I stopped taking photos. the photograph has become superfluous trash in a plethora of unfortunate ways. photojournalists may engage in documenting and in some sense, creating events, but I refuse to ever be responsible for the implications of such shallow images...and as a photojournalist you can never really be independent to guide your own work (unless you're James Nachtwey), let's face it.

despite all of this...I feel that something therapeutic has been missing for the past year. the ability to see something through the lens that someone would normally not imagine in real life. unique idiosyncratic images- whether in color, shape, form - coming together in a unique photograph. creating a photographic vignette out of the real world, whether truth or imaginary....

we'll see if the spark returns, along with my old, now beat-up Canon Rebel XTi....