"Tif the Photographer" and Other Misconceptions
I recently sold my flute. There's a much bigger story here, but I want to focus on a specific aspect of the story today.
Since engaging with the buyer of my flute via text message, I’ve been thinking even more about identity. In our early text exchanges the buyer had asked who I was (my name wasn’t mentioned in the online ad). “This is Tif Holmes,” I texted back to them. Within a few seconds my phone vibrated. I picked it up and looked at the message on the screen. “Tif Holmes the Photographer?!” the text read.
I simultaneously felt a sense of satisfaction from the fact that this person knew me as a photographer and a deep sense of loss (again) that this person who is a professional in the field in which I spent over 25 years didn’t connect my name with music. I suppose that would’ve been strange, given I was selling my flute after not playing it for nearly a decade, but the emotions rolled up into a big ball in my gut anyway.
I paused before responding.
“Yes!” I finally typed. To respond in any other way would surely be obnoxious.
I’ve only been a photographer, in the sense that making images is my full-time job, for six years. I worked part-time as a photographer for about eleven years before that, and as a hobbyist before that.
I was a musician for over thirty years, in the sense that music was my life. I have three degrees in it (and a whole lot of debt). I practiced 8+ hours a day. When I woke up with chapped lips, it ruined my entire day, because chapped lips often meant poor tone. Chapstick was my best friend. The phrase “I can’t. I’m practicing.” was my second-best friend. It kept me out of trouble, mostly, and on some kind of personally satisfactory path toward The American Dream. It was my Homer Hickam story. It was my October Sky.
Until it wasn’t.
I think that poor rural kids can sometimes turn into adults who lack the background and training, and maybe even the actual desire (unbeknownst to us at the time), to sit at a table at an expensive restaurant and talk to / schmooze with someone who could actually help us achieve our version of The American Dream. The only thing I ever remember thinking in such situations was, “I don’t belong here.”
That phrase was stuck in my head throughout my entire music career, and it seems to be stuck there even now, as a photographer trying to sell fine art prints to people with money to buy them. My October Sky was shrouded with storm clouds from the very beginning. Add this to a long list of self-improvement projects.
Early in my doctoral program, I volunteered to drive a professor to the airport. At the time, thanks to my Army enlistment and regular paychecks, I drove a black Nissan Frontier 4x4 pickup truck. Imagine: a classical flutist driving a 4x4 pickup truck with a U.S. Army sticker on the back window. After I’d picked up the professor and we were a few minutes into the drive, he said quietly, “Into breaking stereotypes, huh?” It took me a moment to understand. Then I got it. 4WD truck. Classical music playing on the radio. Assassin flutist behind the wheel.
“Huh. I guess so.” I chuckled.
Perhaps what’s holding us back isn’t that we attach identities and their associated stereotypes to ourselves and others, but that we hold so dang tight to them that there’s no room to grow. To change.
How do we change the world if we won’t allow ourselves—and others—to change?
Apply identities with care. Remove gently.
