Many people have this precise moment in their lives when they found out they loved doing something. My relationship with photography is, unfortunately, a blur (pun not intended). I remember as a young kid playing with the family camera (hidden, of course) and as a teenager saving pocket money so I could buy my own. It was the beginning of the personal digital cameras; they were quite expensive, especially for a teenager without allowance. When I got the camera (a very cheap one), I immediately got frustrated with the images’ overall quality, but I tried to use it for a while. I wasn’t particularly sure what to photograph now that I had my camera, so I would take photos of stuff around me, chairs, computer, doors, windows, birds, lots of birds. I was, to some extent, a shy kid, so photographing people was out of the question, so I always tried not to be seeing with my camera to avoid conversations on the topic.
It wasn’t long after that I decided to get rid of the camera as I couldn’t take photos to my quality satisfaction (pixels in this case). Unfortunately, better cameras were out of my nonexistent financial situation, so I left photography for a while and started focusing on other stuff.
After some years, cellphones started coming with cameras, their quality was pretty low, but at the same time, it was quite convenient having a pocket camera with you all the time; I could photograph everything on the go. It was only many years later that I managed to save some money to buy a DSLR and two lenses, and that changed everything. I had this camera with me the whole time, everywhere I went. That was when I started focusing my photography solely on people, regular people minding their business, eating, talking on the phone, taking selfies, I was always there taking photos of them, and since then, I never stopped. It is relevant to mention that while that seems like a definitive interest in pursuing photography, it wasn’t. I never really stopped for a second during those years and thought that I wanted to be a photographer. That was the purest interest in just photographing for the sake of having that photo.
At some point, even though I can’t pinpoint when it was, but many years later, I decided that I wanted to make portraits professionally, a lot inspired by the photographer Platon that I had recently discovered and Annie Leibowitz. This transition from a hobby to a profession was natural and gradual so that when people ask me when I decided to be a photographer, I can’t answer that because I don’t know.