Image Makers, Image Takers Response

I find it very interesting to see how and when each photographer became interested in photography. Some of the artists were at first studying to become painters, like Mary Ellen Mark, and Alec Soth - who once equated himself to Pablo Picasso. Stephen Shore was very interested in chemistry as a young boy and what cultivated his interests in photography was being able to develop family photographs when he received a dark room kit. David LaChapelle knew from the very beginning that he wanted to be an artist, and even after dropping out of high school because he didn't fit in, he finally finished his education at North Carolina School of Arts where he found his calling. Rineke Dijkstra had always loved watching people that interested her, and so when someone finally lent her a camera, she was able to not just watch, but actually photograph these people that had captivated her attention.
I remember the moment when I fell in love with photography as well. In the summer of 2006, I traveled to Colombia to sail in the Central American and Caribbean Games. I was there with a team of other athletes from the Virgin Islands, and on the days that we weren't sailing, we did a lot of traveling and trying to experience as much of Colombia as we could. I remember being frustrated because even though many of the areas that we went through were very poor and the majority of the people that we encountered were homeless, I found myself drawn to them. What frustrated me was that I had one, no way of really interacting with them, and two, no way of documenting my experience and perception them because I didn't have my own camera yet. The next summer, I traveled to Rio de Janiero, Brazil, for the Pan American Games and Cascais, Portugal for ISAF Sailing World Championships and finally had a camera of my own. I was almost more excited to photograph the people, their culture, and the environment than I was to sail in the regattas. Just looking through the lens of that camera made me feel a great sense of self-satisfaction, and ever since then I have not been able to put my camera down.