The story of an engineer who went to art school
- Bri
- Oct 17, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 24, 2024
"Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still."
~Dorothea Lange
If you take nothing else from this story, know that I pride myself in being very good at my my rare engineering specialty but that I've always struggled to fit into the engineering mold. I think it took leaving it all behind, to study various passions full-time, including art, to understand how to add unique value to my industry.
My story after I left Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, with a Mechanical Engineering Bachelors Degree in hand in 2005, was... uneventful. I put one foot in front of the other, following the traditional Midwest path that was placed in front of me. It took years for me to understand that the constant tension I felt was because a path of tradition was not made for women like me. For nearly a decade, this first chapter of my career and adult life found me, more and more, no longer content to wait for something amazing to happen. I was SEEKING amazement and wonder. I traveled across the world, I took a 4-month long mountaineering class, I trained for and raced endurance sport, culminating in racing several Ironman Triathlons. All the while, I pushed to advance along my chosen career path.
In 2011, I picked up my first DSLR, a Canon 7D, and the kid I was who carried a disposible camera around constantly in high school came back to life. This was an age where smartphones were relatively new (I purchased my first iPhone in 2010) and social media was still a quiet, friendly digital world where we 'poked' people on Facebook. Using a camera to share beautiful, vibrant images of all of the wonder I had been seeking in this world grabbed me like nothing else could. So, I let go of the guard rails and jumped...
Amanda, a friend in Seattle, brought immense talent to our studio sessions
...into the full-time pursuit of an Associates of Commercial Photography at the Art Institute of Seattle.
One of my projects afforded me the opportunity to work with Oiselle A friend, Lyset, helped with several location sessions an was fighting a cold in the session that produced to first image of this set
The rigor of this degree actually caused me more stress than my engineering career. The focus on commercial aspects of this degree (i.e. the reliable, mass production of images) slowly burned me out. I benefitted immensely from learning the gamut of art theory, art history, studio photography, location photography, protraiture, product photography, and food photography.
Food photography - I, legit, spit on the pastries in the first image to give them a deliciously moist appearance
Yet, I also lost touch with my active pursuit of wonder. As my time at the Art Institute came to a conclusion, I had a body of work that I was unsure what to do with in one hand and a driving need fall back in love with life in the other. With any direction possible for what was next, all it took was a friend mentioning that we should hike a section of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT)... for me to jump once again.