Being a Park City Photographer :: The Beginning

I moved to Park City, Utah, in 2011.  I’d never been here before apart from a drive-by on I-80 when I was moving from LA to Chicago for graduate school.

Oh, but I’d heard of Park City.  I’ve been a pop culture junkie since I was a wee one, and the Sundance Film Festival highlights on E! or in People Magazine have long been a favorite of mine.  Park City wasn’t exactly on my radar when I was living in, say, Boston MA, or Louisville KY (or Dublin, Ireland, or Athens, Greece, for that matter), but I knew about it in a remote-luxurious-resort-ski-town-out-of-my-fantasies sorta way.  Kinda like… St. Moritz.

So, when I eloped with V in California and followed him to his home in Utah, I felt in a way that I was making my fantasies come true.  The one point of hesitation was: how do you embark on a career as a photographer in one of the most photographically competitive communities in the country?  Hugely successful shooters that work primarily in bigger markets are able to work remotely from Park City and have already established themselves as ‘the photographers’ in this tiny town.  How do you compete with that?!

Or, forget about focussing solely on gifted photographers — an insane amount of talent, p e r i o d, that lives here.  You see, here’s the deal with this place: people live in Park City because they want to.  Not because they’re stuck here for some reason.  So the types of people that live here could actually live anywhere but they choose to be here and make their careers work from Park City.  That means, generally, that they’re a) talented b) motivated and c) high-achieving.

Which is intimidating as hell for start-ups like myself.

That said, because this town is chock full of accomplished people, there’s an abundance of entrepreneurial spirit.  And, surprisingly, it’s an extremely encouraging vibe.  I’m not sure I’ve found that anywhere else I’ve lived, and it offers an anything-is-possible mentality that is so damn refreshing.  As a result — and despite my anxiety about hanging out my shingle — I found myself excited about what would happen next so long as I put my best efforts out there.

I look forward to writing more about how I got started in this wonderful town — and, hopefully, the way in which I continue to grow, so long as 2014 proves to be as amazing as 2011, 2012, and 2013 were for me.  It’s been an incredible journey indeed!