Well, I think what makes a successful photographer is how they deal with tension, and you're
not going to be making a career of yourself if you don't have any tension.
So I'm kind of on the optimist side of things, where I think this is a great opportunity
for all of us that, yes, we might be going down right now, but it just means that you're
going to be going somewhere else.
So yeah, I mean, we all struggle, everybody struggles, no matter who you are, if you're
Donald Trump or you're Donald Weber, you know, we're always going to struggle.
But I have to say that this sort of new era, it's been quite a profound time for us all
because it's, for me, it's about a future.
And I've always tried to see the future as being positive in that we're just going from
one thing to another.
And so I don't really see it as a negative, I see it as a positive, absolutely.
And frankly, if things hadn't changed, then I would be worried because there's only so
long you can live and do the same thing over and over and over and over again.
What I find this last few years has given us is freedom, and that's all I've ever really
asked for myself is to create some sort of freedom for me.
And if I can have freedom, then I can do what it is that I want to do.
And if I can do what I want to do, then I know financially or monetarily it'll come eventually.
You know, the freedom to be who you are as a photographer and tell the stories that you
want to do.
And for me, it's not necessarily, say, about a specific audience.
You know, magazines are wonderful and everything, but I still believe that I, as a photographer,
also need to consider the final outputs.
In other words, my audience.
And now with so many different modes of communication and different modes of my audience able to
view what it is that I do, it's only going to expand on one thing.
I mean, before there was two, three outlets, a magazine, a newspaper, and a gallery.
It's not much.
Now I could probably count an infinite different ways of having it now.
How do you, and of course the big argument is, well, how do you monetize something?
I don't know.
But I know that it'll come.
With freedom, it brings opportunity, and opportunity brings the modes for us to change
and to move forward.
And that's, again, I mean, it goes back, I've never been, a photographer does a lot of assignments
anyways for magazines and such.
I've always tried to find other ways of funding, if it's through grants or through external
modes of funding, it's there.
And by not having this outlet of a magazine, which I kind of see as a fallback, you know,
we've got books, we've got iPads, iPhones, internets, galleries, and we still have magazines.
And certainly are near to being dead.
It's still a forum for us.
So now we can start multiplying, instead of one forum we have, I don't know, an infinite
amount of forums.
So I think freedom in the end is about opportunity, but you need to create your own freedom.
Who knows?
I was an architect once.
I'm a photographer now.
I don't know what I'm going to be.
I don't know.
I mean, who knows?
That's what I like.
I mean, that's the whole point is that something is kind of, it's nebulous, right?
Who knows where we're going?
I could say I'll be a photographer, but I don't know if that's the truth.
I hope it's the truth.
But again, if it changes to something else, I mean, I have to say, I've been doing this
for about 10 years now.
In the last five, six, seven years, I've had a nice opportunity to do what I want to do.
And I always say, well, if that time comes to an end, that time comes to an end.
But I know that those five, six, seven years, I did exactly what it is that I wanted to
do.
And that's all I can sort of ask for.
