I Called It a Hobby Because I Was Waiting for Someone Else's Permission

By Julie Tower @Tower.Noir

I spent years minimizing the thing I was made to do.

There was a darkroom in my childhood home. A real one. Light-sealed, chemical-sharp, the kind of space that teaches you early that photographs are made, not found — that you have to commit to the exposure before you ever see what you have.

I was drawn to black and white from the beginning. The absence of color felt more honest to me. Light and shadows seemed to offer more depth, rawness, and vulnerability.

I am drawn to b+w, like I'm drawn to truth and illumination of all of its shades and pieces.

I spent years taking photographs and capturing unexplained moments. But despite taking classes, discovering Lightroom in its early editions, doing professional photo shoots, and publishing my photography on blogs and websites for years, I felt like a hobbyist.

I didn't think of myself as anything more than a woman who loved taking photos. And because I wasn't earning a living from photography – and it seemed like only real photographers did that, I didn't see myself as a legit photographer.

Being a photographer wasn't a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. And the idea of going to photography school while raising three young children was said to me to be out of the question. Not to mention, there was no one around me who had a category for a woman with a camera who was not shooting weddings, not chasing commercial clients, not producing content for someone else's brand.

So I borrowed the only category available. I called it a hobby and I kept capturing images of my children's childhood and I told myself that was enough.

For a long time, I kept my photography almost entirely private– hundreds of thousands of digitally stored photos. I was not afraid of criticism exactly — I was afraid of the specific exposure that comes with being seen as someone who takes her own creative work seriously. That fear that comes from being conditioned to seek permission from others around you, rather than giving yourself permission to do what you want most.

This is a particular kind of vulnerability that many photographers, especially women photographers, may likely recognize. Imposter syndrome in photography is rarely about skill. It is about permission. And most of us are waiting for someone else to grant us permission to be exactly who we are.

The photographers I meet — the serious ones, the ones whose black and white photography stops you mid-scroll because the image has actual weight — share a version of the same story. They have been shooting for years. Quietly, privately, carefully. They have a point of view so distinct you could identify their work without a watermark. And they are still not sure they are allowed to call themselves fine art or street photographers.

They are waiting for a credential. A gallery show. A certain number of followers. A partner to notice that what they're doing matters and is more than a hobby, even if unpaid, because it's who they are. A mentor who finally looks at their photography portfolio and says: yes. This counts. You count.

I waited too. For years. And for far too long.

What changed was not external validation. No gallery arrived. No authority figure looked at my cinematic photography and handed me permission to proceed. What changed was that I stopped waiting.

A day arrived when I said to myself. It's time. Right now.

I built the Instagram gallery— Love Unexplained Official — not because anyone asked me to but because the work deserved a place. I launched @tower.noir on Instagram not because I had a growth strategy or wanted to make more content to be consumed on social media, but because the photographs had been waiting long enough. I stopped explaining that I was "just" doing this for myself, because "just" had never been accurate.

My fine art street photography has taken me to incredible cities, including across Europe, to South America, across the United States, and through France and to my beloved Paris, a city I have a deep generational connection to and return to again and again because the light there does something to my soul and to my photos that I have not yet been able to fully explain. That is, perhaps, the right place to make photographs for an archive called Love Unexplained.

The imposter feeling did not disappear when I went public with my work. When I was first invited to show my work in a gallery, I remember the anxiety of feeling like neither I, as a photographer, nor my hobby was quite good enough for public acknowledgement. It still arrives occasionally, quietly, when I share an image that matters to me and wait to see if the world slows down for it. But I have learned to share anyway. To call it what it is — photography, fine art, bold street photography --a body of work with a point of view — without waiting for permission or consensus.

The work was never the problem.

The category was. And as I discovered, you are allowed to refuse the wrong category.

You are allowed to give yourself permission to pursue your passions--and to exist exactly as you were meant to in this one beautiful life.

If you have been shooting for years with no external proof that you are a legitimate photographer, I want you to consider something: the photographs already exist. They are already real. The question has never been whether your work is serious enough. The question is whether you are willing to be serious about it — publicly, consistently, without apology. And without explanation.

You do not need better gear. You do not need a larger Instagram following, a different city, a formal photography education, or a mentor or significant other who finally sees your potential. You need to stop calling it a hobby when you know — when you have always known — that it is not.

Stop waiting. Fill your SD cards. Fill your hard drives. Start posting on social media. Share your work. Show up, again and again. Stay consistent.

The rest will follow.

Julie Tower is a fine art street photographer and the curator of Love Unexplained, a cinematic black and white photography archive documenting love, solitude, and the spaces in between, featuring the work of emerging and renowned photographers. She lives in France and the United States.

Follow Julie's photography at @tower.noir on Instagram.