Raison d’être

It’s a good and glorious thing to be deeply passionate about something.

For it’s that very passion that inspires and influences all else.

Thankfully, for me, photography has always been my Raison d’être.

I honestly can’t even begin to imagine what life would be like without photography.

Perish the thought. The very sentiment makes me anxious.

Photography, almost from the beginning, has not just connected me to the world around me but to myself as well.

Photography isn’t just a casual hobby but a sacred habit.

It’s a right-of-passage into a whole other world of light, color, design, that I’ve been invited into.

For it is in this very world that, happily and gratefully, I am most at home.

I don’t need to go anywhere, as I’m already here.

Photography, at least as we know it today, in all its iterations and forms, began in the late 1830s, in France.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a portable Camera Obscura to delicately and painstakingly expose pewter plate-coated with bitumen to light. Viola.

The rest is history. Click.

We’ve come a long way since then. But the power of photography to document, interpret, transform, influence, rouse, stimulate remains as strong today as when it began a couple of hundred years ago.

Truth be told, what makes us click is the same as what makes us tick.

Photography and life, head and heart, science and art, are inescapably and inexorably intertwined.

Even with the lowliest of cameras in our palms, we can achieve the mightiest of emotions and share those with a worldwide swathe of family, friends, fans, and followers.

My Raison d’être is photography. I know this is why I was born and put on this earth.

And to that noble and heartfelt end, I will live out my best-of-days, clicking and ticking, what life and love bring before my eyes and heart.

Jack