Reflections on a Break / by Braden Williams

I haven't taken a photograph at Collegiate since Graduation.I just spent the past 30 minutes or so scrolling through my 40000+ image Lightroom collection looking at photos from high school, reminiscing, and attempting to confront my active pullback from the Collegiate community as a photographer. This active pullback was spurred on by a couple of different things. A lot of the photos I've taken in the past have been for The Journal(The school paper) and I've not been involved in that publication since last winter, but that's another story. I began to say at the beginning of the year that I wasn't taking photographs because "I had photographed Collegiate so much over the years, that it had become repetitive and boring". That is complete and utter bullshit, but not really. Collegiate in actuality is never repetitive, 3/4 of the upper school student body is different from when I was a freshman, 1/2 is different from when I was a sophomore, and 1/4 is different since I've become a Senior. Furthermore there are some pretty basic subjects that I've failed to ever cover. I've never once shot a wrestling match, I've also never photographed a running event. I think my real reason for backing away from photography at Collegiate this year is trying to acquire 'genuine' memories in my last year at Collegiate. I've found that my memory of any given event that I've photographed is locked to my photography, mention Godspell and I instantly think of the photographs I took over the course of the production, and not of the production itself. My camera also acts as a barrier to true human connection; by having my camera up all the time, I really am hiding behind the lens, and avoiding people, not working to make good connections. Finally I truly have moved through the Collegiate Photography opportunities, while I haven't captured every genre or subject in Collegiate, I've done a good part of it, and I've come to understand certain aspects of Collegiate through this work. This post is probably ending up in the purgatory of wallsoftext, but writing it down helped me work through this decision, and that's whats important.