“What made you pick up a camera?” A question I’m sure everyone in this group, and reading this, has heard at least once. Why photography? What is the drive to create? Why hold this machine up to your eye to give your art a voice? Where did it start?

For me, I had a spark of interest, exhausted the use of small film point and shoots as a child, and so as a teenager, my grandfather gave me his Canon AE-1 that was sitting up in a closet. “When I need it back, I’ll let you know,” he said.

He died a few years ago, but I recently found myself looking through some scans of photos he had taken – presumably some of them with this same Canon. There are snapshots, documenting family weddings, new babies, holidays and the like. And there are also these gems where he set up a little bit of a studio situation, grabbing portraits of himself and my grandma, of his parents, of his children.

So, maybe it wasn’t just grandpa “loaning” his camera to me so many years ago that sparked my interest in photography. Perhaps it’s been in my bones all along.

All the best,
Alison