“The Problem with getting high is that eventually, you have to come back down.” These are the words of my Guru, Ram Dass, and the dilemma I faced after attending my first photo industry event, Canada Photo Summit 2023.

I waffled on whether or not to attend. It was geared towards wedding photographers, which is a dream of mine, but not a reality. It cost $400, which at that time, and the time of writing this, was a major investment for me. But the real thing that tripped me up was my relationship with my own path in photography. I decided a little less than a year ago to try and make a go of this whole photography thing as a career. It’s been rocky, full of self doubt, frustration, and fear. It’s also been really cool, meaningful, fulfilling and exciting… but those aren’t the things that were holding me back from attending. I was genuinely terrified of trying to answer the inevitable question of “What do you shoot?”

This past year I’ve shot real estate, product, event, portrait, sports, fashion and architectural photography. I’ve basically said yes to anything I could be paid for and learn from. I strongly believe it is a smart approach, as it helped me to figure out what I love to shoot and what I definitely don’t want to shoot. But I also assumed that I would be surrounded by a group of people who had successfully niched down and found a path for their photography that not only was providing them with the kind of creative experiences they valued, but also with a sense of purpose and financial safety that I was severely lacking.

Thankfully my partner, Katie, is much smarter than me. As far as she was concerned I absolutely deserved to be there and it would be ridiculous not to attend a Photo Summit featuring incredibly talented speakers that was taking place in my hometown. She was right, as I so often find myself thinking. So, I bought the ticket and waited in a kind of quiet nervous state for the following few weeks.

I will get this out of the way right now; It was worth it. Every speaker was amazing, the other attendees were so kind and I immediately bought a ticket for next year. I won’t be able to do justice to the event by trying to summarize it, or its speakers, so I am just going to get right back into all the feels it brought up instead. Also I took basically zero photos because I didn’t think ahead so… here you go!

Here’s the baggage I was bringing into that week, in no particular order:

• I am not far enough in my career to deserve to be here.
• I know there’s room in my local wedding industry for more photographers, but surely I will not have anything to offer.
• I am basically a fraud and I barely have a portfolio and no one is gonna like me and it’s gonna feel like high school all over again and OMG why am I even doing this I should just hide and pretend like I forgot.

 

Cool, hey? The worst part is, I didn’t even know how to articulate any of this at the time. I knew that faking confidence was just not something I was interested in doing, but I also didn’t know how to maintain vulnerability while not getting hurt. That is a lot of weird stuff to bring to what is essentially just a big educational and networking event. What the hell was going on with me?! I will try to make this brief. I lost everything in my last career. I left the coffee industry after 15 years having lost my businesses, my colleagues and even my house just to pay off the debts incurred due to the shuddering of my cafes. My last hurrah in the coffee industry was in a consulting capacity and was incredibly fraught, with emotional and verbal abuse like I had never experienced. So, when I walked away and chose to pursue my passion, I was fucking terrified of it not working out. I still am. I am in a brand new industry that is even more precarious than the last one I was in, starting from the ground up while being in my mid-thirties and having people that rely on me not only financially, but to be a present, loving, kind man in our family unit. Essentially, this has to work. Or at least that’s what I was telling myself. Hopefully that helps to illustrate where all these wild thoughts were coming from.

 

Here’s the thing, none of that really mattered once I sat down in my seat and started listening. Because what I heard was story after story of how the most important thing was to continue to put yourself out there, to be true to your own path and to let yourself grow. More than anything I heard that what these photographers were experiencing was living a life as an act of service. Coming from running cafes, and from my work with Karma Yoga, this idea of service resonated deeply. Whether it was through the tangible acts of gift-giving to their couples or the more subtle nature of holding emotional space, The transmission for me was clear.

 

The Problem with with an event like this stems back to what I said at the beginning. The problem with getting high is that you have to come back down. In spiritual circles this might mean the use of psychedelics or the path of meditation; either way, you only get a glimpse of whats up there. Inevitably you come back down to earth. This Photo Summit got me high, but it would not sustain me. I noticed a real sadness and hollowness the few days after things wrapped up. Here I was, back in my home, in the same circumstances as before, but having just gotten a glimpse of what it all could look like, thanks to these amazing artists I was learning from… But I couldn’t stay up there.

 

Ultimately, that was something I had to find for myself. So if it’s not just about getting high and coming back down over and over, what is it about? It’s about getting free. Freeing yourself from that rollercoaster ride. Creating a life that sustains a level that slowly edges you towards that freedom. I’m still trying to figure out what that looks like for me. For now I think it looks like building a community with other photographers, asking for more opportunities to be a part of the things I value, and thanks to Christine Tremoulet, blogging. Getting my thoughts down in the hopes that it resonates.

That doesn’t feel like an ending, but it’s where we’re at.

 

Chiokoe Utte’essia,

C