An Interview for a random internet magazine.
“Caleb, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.”
When I was a little kid, I pretty much lived off a diet of National Geographic and PBS nature documentaries. I would sit and watch recorded episodes of Wild America on old VHS tapes over and over again until I knew them by heart. That little kid sitting in the living room didn’t have big dreams of fame or and fortune, which is good, because I still don’t have either. More simply, that kid just wanted to walk around outside and act like he was the second coming of Daniel Boone. That was the simplicity of being young. Not having the pressure of life bearing down on you. As you grow older, you slowly start to realize that real life is not just watching nature documentaries and running around the woods with a stick smacking trees. There are these things called jobs and money that are apparently extremely handy to have.
Life has a weird way of winding you back and forth from new and old places. That little kid with the stick and coonskin cap grew up. The dream of wandering around the woods had been safely packed away, replaced with the generic life goal of getting a college degree and finding a generic business job. For some ungodly reason, I thought that was what you were supposed to do in life. It wasn’t until I actually graduated and went into a corporate job that I realized I had the right idea all those years ago sitting on the floor watching David Attenborough. At that point, I was taking some truly horrendous photos. I’m talking about maxing out those saturation sliders, upping the exposure to look like a nuclear explosion was happening in the distance, and cranking that clarity filter like I was trying to see how far it could go before god himself admitted he had made a mistake. I then proceeded to call those abominations that I created art, and it haunts me to this day.
Even then, I knew that if I could figure out this whole photography thing, I could just maybe get back to walking around the woods, occasionally smacking a tree with a stick, and living that younger me’s dream. So I did.
“What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?”
There is no real goal or mission honestly. I guess in a sense, the closest it ever becomes to a mission is to do something that the small kid sitting on the floor 25 years ago, binge watching nature documentaries, would be proud of. It’s an easy way to look at life, but it works. There was never any goal of doing this to become something special or to create something that other people like, It’s just a simple pursuit of happiness.
