I’ve sometimes had difficulty explaining to people why I keep making art when often I’m not making any money from it. I thought this was, therefore, a rather useful quote from photographer Jessica Todd Harper:
“I think being an artist is not so much something you choose as something that you are born being. You are an artist and then you work around or with that. There are a lot of people in medicine in my family and I have often envied them for the logical progression of their careers: medical school, residency, patient care. It’ s not like that with art. There are no guarantees that if you work hard enough, or are talented enough, that you will be successful, be able to support yourself, or importantly, make a meaningful contribution to others. But in the meantime, if you are an artist, the art just comes – weather you like it or not- because you can’t stop it. Even when I have been very busy and don’t actually make pictures, the world keeps presenting itself, day and night, and I can’t stop wanting to make some sense of it, to describe it, to honor it, to record it. And I get this restlessness that is not relieved until I make some pictures. I keep working in this field not so much because I am inspired (though there are many I admire!) but because other than making pictures and putting them under my bed to show no one, I have no other choice than to be in my field.”
(Excerpted from this interview on the Two Way Lens blog, found via A Photo Editor (I think))
