| I’m a self-taught photographer in my late 20s living, unfortunately, in Florida. I’ve had no schooling or training of any sort in this field. Instead, I’ve learned by trial and error, and have just gone where my head has taken me. This has probably held me back technically some, especially since I started out making images with a scanner turned on its side, and have since used digital cameras for the most part, but I prefer it my way. I don’t focus on what is right or wrong, and definitely not what has been done before. |  |
Caryn Drexl
I’m a self-taught photographer in my late 20s living, unfortunately, in Florida. I’ve had no schooling or training of any sort in this field. Instead, I’ve learned by trial and error, and have just gone where my head has taken me. This has probably held me back technically some, especially since I started out making images with a scanner turned on its side, and have since used digital cameras for the most part, but I prefer it my way. I don’t focus on what is right or wrong, and definitely not what has been done before. No one is telling me where I should be or what I need to focus on, let alone push his or her personal taste onto my work. I’m hard enough on myself anyways without someone else on my back.
As far as the images themselves, as I mentioned, most of my images are from digital cameras, but some are film. Some are altered after the fact, some are not (though these days I go to great lengths to create things in real life that many rely on filters or brushes in Photoshop to create). And nearly all my images are of women. This wasn’t done on purpose really, I just find that all my ideas involve women and not men. It might just be a matter of shooting what I know, especially since a good portion of my images are self-portraits. This is not because I enjoy my face or want to look at myself all the time, since I typically don’t even see myself in the finished product. It started out as therapy and from there just became convenient. I can give myself what I want, and I am usually the only one around at 3 am when something comes to me and I must shoot it immediately.
Recently though, I’ve found myself taking far fewer self-portraits, but I always think it would be interesting to one day, towards the end of my life, have a show of all my self-portraits over the years. So, for that reason alone, I don’t think I will ever stop completely.
For the most part, I’m very against going into too much detail about what I do and why I do it. I even hate putting titles to my images, and when I do, they usually mean little to nothing at all. My images are meant to be whatever the viewer perceives them as, not what I tell them. They are sort of like “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, only it’s choose your own back story or meaning instead. And so I prefer to present them to you at face value and nothing more, that way you can react in whatever way you will, without my influencing you with an explanation of why (or how) I’ve done what I’ve done and what it all "means." Sure I make images for myself, but I make them for everyone else as well.
