Long before I even picked up my first camera, I had a very strong passion for music, specifically playing the piano. I played piano for almost my entire life. There were many times I wanted to quit because I hated the repetitive practice of my scales and chord inversions. Those many long hours sitting on my bench practicing would pay off when I finally perfected and performed the songs I had spent so much time working on. My favorite song to play is Autumn Leaves. The simplicity of the song leaves the player with freedom to reinterpret the song in an infinite number of ways. And while playing the piano sits on the back burner for me to focus on other projects in my life, I always come back to the piano once in a while to play that song. I find myself in a hypnotic trance, looping the song over and over again, with each loop slightly different than the last time I played it. While I am meditating at the piano, lost in my playing, I am guided simply by my ear.
I am definitely not the best at playing by ear, but it is when I feel the most freedom and joy at the piano. I didn’t learn how to play by ear until I had already been playing piano for about a decade, but after I finally learned, I felt like I had wasted most of the previous decade playing. Early on, when I first started learning how to play, I had a fairly standard music education: learning music theory, learning mostly classical pieces, practicing scales and chords, and working on my Hanon exercises. I’d occasionally get a rare treat getting to learn a song that I had more of a connection to, like when I learned how to play Song of Storms from The Legend of Zelda. Although this left me as someone who was a very technical player, someone who had very good technique, I felt like I was a parrot repeating back the things put in front of me rather than an artist creating sounds that were unique to me and had their own meaning. My playing, despite sounding pleasant, lacked the sort of internal affection to move people, especially not myself. I was very close to giving up playing because of this. Why should I practice for hours to play music that never felt musical? In all honesty, I didn’t even know how to go about making that transition from parroting sounds to creating art.
I got my first taste of this transition when I got a new teacher in middle school, but I didn’t fully grasp what my teacher was trying to show me until much later on. My new teacher, Nico, asked me, “So what do you want to learn how to play?” This question really stumped me when he first asked me it. I was so used to being told what to play and taught how to play it that I never really thought about the things I wished to play. That one simple question was probably one of the most important questions to ask a young musician. For the first time, I started listening to and playing music that felt more like me. I had a small musical renaissance in my life. Still, my playing remained pretty clockwork-like, but at least I was reflecting more of what felt near and dear to me. The next big eureka moment for me didn’t come until high school, when I started listening to, easily one of the most fascinating musicians alive today, Jacob Collier. I remember stumbling upon Jacob’s early music on YouTube, where he, barely 21 years old, was recording some of the most interesting music I’d ever heard. His covers of Flintstones, Close To You, and You and I seemed so extravagant. When I covered a song, I tried to play it as it was written or as close to the original as possible. Jacob took these beloved songs and tore them apart, leaving his clear mark on each song. I was in love with how Jacob approached music. Every song feels like something only he could have produced. Every song Jacob played, Jacob played like he wanted to play it.
Another side of Jacob that really fascinated me was his Audience choirs. The audience choir is something not invented by him, but he has turned it into one of the most beautiful reflections of humanity at its best. I finally got my chance to see Jacob live for the first time in June of 2023. Being part of the audience choir fundamentally changed a part of my brain. Jacob has often described the audience choirs as giving the audience “permission.” When I was part of the audience, I opened myself up to be an individual voice among a sea of others, each with their own unique voice. The sum total of this wave of people coming together is the creation of song that no individual person could perform alone, and no group of people could ever recreate. I was in my middle school choir, and I was terrified of singing alone and singing something wrong. I even remember crying twice because I was forced to perform solo. I couldn’t even sing with friends in my car because I could hear my own voice. After this concert, I can’t help but sing for hours with my friends in the car during long drives. Today, I tell anybody and everybody that if they have a chance to see Jacob live and experience the audience choir, they simply have to. Jacob’s permission unlocked for me the permission to trust my gut. I can freely ask myself, “Do I like that?” Two Months after this concert, I started photography.
The first two months after that concert, I remember doing something that I had never done before as a musician. Every day, I would go to the piano and just sit there for hours noodling, playing music freely without any strict boundaries. I never really knew where what I was playing would go; I just played, and I played like a child with it. I would hit notes that I normally wouldn’t be pulled to in the key I was in, and I sat with the feelings they left me. I explored those feelings. I learned more about music in those two months than the years of playing music before it. I finally learned how to use the most important muscle that an artist can know how to use, the skill of looking inward. When I started photography, I was at a point in my life where I first became intoxicated by exploring what made me, Jordan.
A month ago, I was talking with my friend Alex, one of the most emotionally intelligent and wise people I have had the pleasure of becoming friends with. I was talking about how I am finally starting to really accept who I am; I feel less self-conscious about the things I like, the people I love, the hobbies that consume my free time, the clothes I wear, and the art that I create. Alex kindly affirmed, “You’re coming into your own.” After a few rough months struggling with the ever-changing tides and currents that come with growing up, it was a simple phrase that strengthened me against the knocking waves. It was exactly what I needed to hear after getting thrashed around. My identity had been thrown into question at the beginning of the summer. And now, at the end of summer, the beginning of fall, I have emerged more confident in myself.
Three years after starting photography and taking it seriously, I am more confident in my future as a photographer than I have ever been. I wrote all of that to now turn everything on its head by saying that about 8 days ago, from the time of me writing this, I had the worst case of impostor syndrome that I have ever had. I was photographing a wedding the next day, and I was seriously worried that I would somehow ruin it. I remember sitting down at Pressed, my favorite coffee shop (and where I work), editing photos of Wintergreen Gorge and talking with my friend about my impostor syndrome. At this point, I was nervously tapping my foot and chugging my typical order of a 20 oz Iced Chai Latte. My friend reassured me that I was going to do the same amazing job that I had done before and that this time I was even more prepared than I was for all of the weddings that had come before. I had just finished getting all of my equipment ready; I carefully cleaned my camera sensor, I had charged its battery and an extra power bank, I formatted both of my SD cards, I meticulously cleaned each of my lenses, and I packed my bag with everything that I could need for the wedding day. I knew that I was prepared, but I still couldn’t shake the angst.
The next day, the day of the wedding, I had the pleasure of capturing one of the sweetest weddings I have ever been to. The wedding was a small, intimate wedding for the immediate family at a vineyard the family owned. The weather was pleasantly overcast, which cast a soft, cool light upon the wonderful, lively greens and blues of the vines and grapes. And as I spent this most special day taking photos, I had the pleasure of getting to know a beautiful family that had nothing but love to share. It was the kind of wedding where everything falls into place perfectly. The bride and bridesmaids told me how they superstitiously buried a sausage for good weather the night before, and the couple went out and found a handful of different four-leaf clovers before the wedding. Now I can’t say I am superstitious myself, but I can say that it did seem like all of the best light had shone upon the entire family that day. And lucky for me, my job as a photographer is to capture light and to share it.
This week, while processing the photos that I remember being so nervous about, I worked my way to a photo of the bride and her father blowing bubbles together after the wedding ceremony. I had to stop at this photo because I began to tear up in my seat at Pressed. I was doing everything in my power not to completely ball my eyes out at the beauty of this photo. When I took this photo, I remembered how sweet this moment was, but I didn’t expect it to be my favorite photo of the entire wedding. When I stumbled upon the photo again, I thought about the reception dinner at the very end of the night. I was still dutifully taking photos, but I still did my best to listen to each of the little speeches that everyone in the family gave at the dinner. When it came time for the bride’s father to give his speech, I remembered the man who had been so jolly the entire day, fighting back tears (just like I am once again fighting back tears writing this) while he retold a sweet story of his daughter when she was still a child. At that moment, I thought about just what it meant for the daughter on the day of her wedding to still be his baby girl. I was engulfed by a sea of emotions despite only knowing about their relationship for one small night.
The past few days I’ve reflected on how so many of the individual photos that I have taken and will take for others couldn’t possibly mean as much to me as them. When I see photos of people, I can only reflect upon the time I have spent beginning to know them. When they see these photos, they will be able to project their entire life leading up to that moment upon that photo. They will carry all of those tiny stories that I know nothing about. The kind of stories that can move a man to tears, as they have moved me. Photos, like any artwork, aren’t just what they appear to be. You meet art with the entire force of your life up until that moment and have things both seen and unseen revealed to you.
After the wedding, while getting ready to leave, saying goodbye to the family, while saying goodbye to the newlywed couple, the groom gave me a big warm hug. Driving home, I thought about that hug at the very end of the night, and I was laughing to myself, knowing that I was anxiously over-preparing myself because of my impostor syndrome. I knew it was silly to be as nervous as I was. The words of my friend before the wedding came back to me at that moment; they told me, “It’s good to be nervous because it’ll keep you sharp, but don’t overstress it.” I laughed because I was definitely overstressing myself over it.
Impostor syndrome can be good to have; as my friend said, it can be good to be nervous because it’ll keep you sharp. It wasn’t completely warranted in the way it manifested for me the day before the wedding, though. It made me blindly ignore all of the experience I had leading up to the wedding, which gave me the confidence to accept the job in the first place. I forgot about the work I have done to stop and capture the small appreciable moments that make a day like that so special. I really only thought about the side of me that can be clumsy, the side of me that walks into walls, the side of me that has butter fingers. In that moment, as I was nervously chugging my drink at the coffee shop, I truly was being a pessimist about myself.
When I was younger, I remember hearing something like “being a good optimist means hoping for good weather, but having an umbrella ready.” The day of the wedding was the kind of day where I was prepared for the worst, and got the best. After some reflection, I realize that even if everything went wrong, if the weather had turned sour, I still would have been prepared. Every job that I was tasked with and could have been tasked with during the day was something I have spent practicing and practicing over the course of countless hours. I thought about the nervous angst that I had before I would perform the piano at my jazz band concerts. I thought about how I would stress myself before my choir performances in middle school. The time spent practicing for those concerts was no different than the time I spent practicing for the wedding. And the ironic thing is, I feel way more confident as a photographer than I do and ever did as a musician.
I can imagine that for a good while, I’ll still probably get some varying degrees of imposter syndrome when someone asks me to be their wedding photographer, but it’ll get better over time. I don’t expect it to be over anytime soon, but it’ll get better. After all, I could only truly say I was beginning to feel confident in my own identity as Jordan about a month ago, when my friend Alex told me how he saw me coming into my own.
A Grey Plover
I am currently twenty-two and some change years old. I turn twenty-three in less than two weeks. Something about that feels so strange. Getting older is melancholy. You learn the things you wanted to learn, you learn things that you didn’t want to learn, and you learn that you have so much more to learn. There have been times in my life when I have felt in the dark, where the future was scarier because I knew there was so much I didn’t see ahead, and I had no clue how I would face it or if I would be ready to face it. I currently sit at what feels like the beginning of a great mountain ahead that I plan on summiting with only the gear I have packed and my feet to carry me, but I am excited to make my way on the journey ahead.
When I think about the road ahead, I reflect on that realization I had as a pianist, my realization that I had wasted my time just parroting sounds instead of being guided by my ears and heart. Although the medium of my art has changed, the lessons I learned as a pianist are carried on in my life as a photographer. I am now guided by my eyes and heart instead. Having experiences like processing the wedding photos and getting choked up over one of the photos I took is cathartic because it reminds me that I am doing exactly what I should be doing! Turning twenty-three soon is such a spooky yet exciting milestone in my life. Having come so far and having so much still ahead. What other lessons have I learned that will carry me forward? What lessons will I have wished I knew and will make me feel like I wasted time not knowing? What skills do I overvalue? What skills do I undervalue?
I won’t attempt to answer those questions right now, but maybe I’ll sign off with this. The answers to those questions will be a constant process of discovery, practice, repetition, and rediscovery. It’s a fool’s mission to hope to have all of the answers, but it’s not unwise to have a compass to help point you in the right direction. What I was missing in my piano practice for so long, and what makes me so joyous about photography, is my compass.
