One of the strangest things I find that people can’t get their heads around is the fact that I have two jobs, photographer and lighting designer. I can’t fathom why. I often get asked “so which one is your proper job then?” as though it’s simply not possible to have two careers running concurrently. The nature of my work is very much project based, meaning I’ll be working on a particular commission over a particular time scale. So as long as I don’t literally double book myself, why should one project interfere with another, let alone force me to not do one job “properly”.
I’ve always seen photography and lighting design as two sides of the same coin anyway. They are both fundamentally about working with light in a creative way. In lighting design you create light and in photography you record it. Even then, if you look into it even closer, in lighting design you create light and then record it as cues so that it can be seen again; and in photography you create the light (with either flash or filters or even more fundamentally, by deciding how much of it you allow into the camera) and you record it so that it also can be seen again. Pretty similar if you ask me.
I think there is a lot of snobbery factor to consider too. Particularly in the art photography field. I often sense a notion that artists should be purists, dedicating their lives to their particular art form to the exclusion of everything else, spurning the notion of earning a living and doing the washing up in their pursuit of art.
Maybe I should call myself “an artist who works exclusively with light”.....