Why am I taking photos?

A couple of years ago I looked at all of my photos as a body of work and I really questioned why I was taking photos, what was the purpose? I had amassed somewhere near 70,000 photos since I started to catalog them in 2000 and I had hit a moment of “what’s the use?”. I knew that some day I would become very old and die and when I did, someone would have to deal with them all. Not too soon afterwards they would never be seen again. So why was I doing this? Why was I investing so much of my money in all of this camera gear, and specific computer hardware for backups etc. etc., and so much time in going out to take photos, edit them and post them somewhere?

I was really on the fence about selling all of the gear off and quitting altogether. At one point I looked at the different catalogs I had created and I saw all of the things that I had done, and all of the places I had gone, either for work or on just on a whim, and it just came to me that what I was looking at was a catalog of my life over the past 20+ years. I had taken photos not only from an artistic perspective, but just a snapshot of events in my life. It had brought back so many memories to me of these events. I realized that in the later years of my life when I’m not able to do what I can do now, that I can look back and remember what I had done and accomplished. It just came to me that I was taking photographs for ME. I knew that I was doing it all for me, for my love of just doing it, for expanding my world to be in a place I may not have normally gone, to capture a moment in time that I only saw and captured it in a way that I understood.

Since I came to this understanding , it gave me a renewed purpose to take photographs, to continue to invest in the thing I love to do. Because of my new understanding I can share my joy with people in a very different way than I ever had before. Sure I’d love to sell photographs to people (Mainly to help with the cost of a SUPER expensive hobby!). I can’t imagine anyone who is doing this wouldn’t want to, but it’s more important to me to be able to take photographs and share them with people because I love to do it not because my goal is to become rich and famous.