Brooke Shaden

When I moved to Los Angeles I had been doing photography for 2 months. I was not yet convinced that I would pursue it as a career but I knew that it felt like more than a hobby. My first job was at a production company where I was the receptionist. I knew for a fact that I didn’t want to do that the rest of my life. I thought I would be a filmmaker, and while I love the idea of making films, I don’t actually like making films. I’m more of a solo-kind-of-gal. After I had been working my job for a couple of months, the other employees began taking notice that I would spend most of my days editing whatever picture I had shot at 6am that day in my apartment. People starting coming out from their offices and creeping behind my desk to see what the new photo of the day was. They saw more photos than Flickr did – the good and bad, and the really bad too.

They started asking questions like “Why are you here?” and “Why aren’t you a photographer”?

I thought that sounded crazy since I had only been taking photographs for a few months. But then I realized that the idea didn’t sound crazy to anyone but myself. For so long hearing that seemed like an empty compliment, like someone trying to say something nice because there wasn’t much else to say. But then I realized that I was the only one saying NO to the idea of being a photographer while sitting in a sea of people saying YES. I said “No, I can’t be a photographer” so many times that I realized what I was actually saying was, “No, I WON’T be a photographer”. The truth was, and is, that I am a photographer if I want to be one, and so I chose to be.

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Photo credit: Liad Cohen | Yes, that really is my mom. No, that is not my sister. Yes, she looks young enough to be my sister. :)

All growing up I was quite the messy child. I heard constantly from my mom, “When are you going to pick your clothes up? They won’t pick themselves up!”, or “Your shoes aren’t going to walk themselves up the stairs”. I can still hear her saying that when I look at my own apartment and I see my shoes piled up in a corner of the living room. The guilt seeps in. She’s gotten through. But what she did, perhaps without realizing it, was instill a sense of productivity. My mom is the most productive person I have ever met, by far. She gets up at the crack of dawn, cleans and exercises and does any other errands she can think of before she goes to work for 10 hours, then comes home and makes sure everyone is happy before she goes to bed.

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