The Leaving: When The Creative Career and the Rest of Life Collide
“Porter’s Place”, Lehi, Utah, April 1992
Hello Friend,
Late in the summer of 2000, while I was the photo editor of the Augusta Chronicle, the director of photography called me into her office. We sensed at the time that this was one of the last meetings we would have together.
She had started just a few months earlier after our last DOP abruptly quit at the beginning of the year. I was looking forward to working with her, because I thought she would help me be a better manager and photographer. Unfortunately, the stresses of the prior two years, both at the job and away from it, were mounting up.
After five years of journalism school and 10 years as a photojournalist, I started looking for work – gasp – outside of photography. This wasn’t just a change to another newspaper or a different position in photography; this was a complete career change I was contemplating. I had been spending the past few months conducting “informal interviews” all over town as I gathered info on what might be a good next step for me. The idea for these interviews came from the book “What Color is Your Parachute?”. I highly recommend this book for anyone planning a large career or life change. It really helped me lay out the steps to take to move from photography to … something else.
“The Way is Blocked” Aiken, SC, September 2024
Being a photographer was a large part of who I was, and looking at this possible chang was its own stress. I had spent the early part of my life carving out a path that looked very different than what my parents had expected of me and what my siblings had done with their lives. I had always told myself I was the untraditional one, the outsider who blazed my own path. I had spent years going against the standard way of doing things, and here I was at a point where I was seriously looking at changing my life to fit those more traditional and standard ways.
Like a lot of people, this crisis – maybe a little dramatic, but it felt like it at the time – came on with the birth of our daughter and our move to another part of the country. Even though my wife had just graduated college with her criminal justice degree and was looking to start her own career, we also knew having a stay-at-home parent was the best thing for a young child. My wife and I came from very traditional looking families with two parents and a mom who stayed home with us kids. We were seeing our friends also struggle with this decision: the lower family income and one parent home raising our child, or two incomes and paying someone else to raise our little one. We were also at a point where we wanted nicer things: like a more up-to-date car, rent a nicer place, maybe buy a home, do some traveling, let alone all the things we thought a new child would need. No way to do these on a photographer’s salary. Thus, the meeting with my manager.
“The Lost Family” Aiken, SC, October 2024.
She was confronting me about why I was talking to people in our newspaper’s advertising department without talking to her first. To be fair, I wasn’t applying for anything, yet, I was asking the advertising people about their jobs and what it was like. As I had said, I had been doing informal interviews like this for months. So, during this meeting I did let her know, that yes, I was deciding to leave the photo world I loved to join the more corporate side of things as – head hang here – a salesperson.
How many people felt they had to make this same choice? Keep at what you love to do, but not sure if you can make it work financially? Did I “sellout” by moving to sales? Or should I have tried harder and stuck it out? I have seen a similar event play out for so many other people who would like to have a “creative career”, but are unable to pull it off for one reason or another
A recent email from my friend Melinda, another Aiken photographer, got me thinking about these moves away from the careers we saw for ourselves and then the moves onto more “traditional” paths. Like me, she was a journalist for years, and as her family grew, she left it to go into corporate marketing. It was later in life that photography became an important pursuit again for both of us. (These “returns” to creative pursuits will be the theme for next week’s blog.)
“Two Lost Stumps” Aiken, SC, January 2025
How often have we heard these stories – and lived them ourselves? The kid who loves music and wants to either play in a band or help produce the music, but can’t seem to support themselves. The writer who works on their novel for months or years, then sets it aside. The entrepreneur who has an idea, but doesn’t get it off the ground. The young kid who loves to paint/draw/sculpt, but doesn’t see any way to support themselves, let alone raise a family doing it. Any of us who had earlier dreams and even careers, that we stepped away from thinking they “weren’t practical”.
There are those that seem to make it work and have that career that was creative. Even through all their challenges, they were able to keep at it. Though, they seem to be the exception. Many of us moved away from our dreams because other dreams and other factors came into play as our lives happened.
Thank you and keep creating what you do.
Patrick Krohn
May 2026
“Fallen Trees, Broken Foundation” Aiken, SC, November 2024
I could have looked for other photo work, but part of my new dream was to settle down and be very involved with my wife and daughter, being a traveling freelancer would not have fit in there. And, just as importantly, I didn’t want to move as much as I did when I was a kid. Later, after seeing what happened to my newspaper, I’m glad I was able to step out on my terms. While I was there, we had the DOP, me as the editor, eight photographers and two lab techs. This was not uncommon for a paper of that size. But, about eight years after leaving, I ran into one of the photographers. He told me the department was mostly just him as a main photographer and a few reporters who would also take pictures. And it wasn’t long after that conversation, that the newspaper ceased to be.
This was what happened across the publishing industry. So, there would have been some type of dramatic change to my world around that time anyway. I was just a little ahead of the curve getting out when I did and the way I did. What was lost and what was gained for me for the past 25 years will be the subject of next week’s blog, as I returned to photography and expanded my views on what a creative career could look like.