I wouldn’t be where I am today without the Internet, and that’s not an understatement by any means – my entire career is due to it. I started journaling online when I was eleven. Basically, as soon as I knew what a blog was, I made one and haven’t stopped since. In my teen years, I found a community of fellow young photographers online (on Flickr, then Tumblr) and it shaped my vision as an artist immensely. I’d spend my afternoons after school taking photos and then my nights editing and posting my work and getting feedback from my peers; that was my coming-of-age experience.
A lot of these people I grew up with online are making amazing work now and getting a lot of recognition; people like Michael Bailey-Gates,
Eleanor Hardwick, or
Olivia Bee. I think there’s also a duality for me when it comes to existing on the Internet: it both keeps me going and, at the same time, it terrifies me because I hate the feeling of people looking at me, knowing about me. So I just have this weird impulse to constantly publish myself online yet at the same time it’s something that’s very stressful to me.