As an Aggie engineer who meanders around as a photographer for a newspaper, I’m often asked what drew me to photography and journalism at The Battalion.
The question I am asked less often, yet is even more important, is why I stick around photojournalism. For most who ask about The Batt, the furthest they tend to get is “how cool being on the field must be” or that I’m “so lucky to be right there when the big moment happened,” and to be frank, they are completely right.
Whether it be the first Lone Star Showdown football game in over a decade, United States Secretaries Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Brooke Rollins ‘94 visiting A&M, photographing the school’s interim president midinterview or Aggie traditions such as Student Bonfire, I’ve experienced Aggieland unlike most. Being so close to the action, the emotions are intensified. More importantly, the experiences are further heightened by how personal connections in my life weave through my work and the stories I tell.
Last year, for example, the Aggie football team decisively bested LSU on the road, 49-25, for the first time since 1994. Interestingly, just as I witnessed the victory in person, as a senior, my dad witnessed the last road victory in Death Valley, as a senior at A&M, in 1994. As the team roared around me, hundreds of Aggies piling into the bottom of the stands, I thought of him. Seeing pieces of him in my Aggie experience has become strangely emotional for me. Lived 32 years later, the distance closes with every step I retrace through my own Aggie experience, finding pieces of him along my own path.
Likewise, I’ve also retraced the steps of another family member through my journalistic work. Something I didn’t learn until after joining The Battalion, and well after his death, was my grandfather’s history with journalism and amateur photography.
As a kid, I was always told about “Papa the Doctor,” only ever seeing him when he came to international medical conferences in the States on behalf of a Venezuelan medical embassy or another organization, never hearing about how he was an opinion columnist and a published author.
Only when I grew older, well after he died of cancer, did I learn about his work in writing, and how much of himself he left in books and articles. Although I struggle to remember what his voice sounds like, his writing speaks for him. Before the wheezing of his voice and the hobble of his last steps, I can wind back the clock to the vigor of his voice and his whiplike wit.
At the same time, I now also carry his cameras, which, like all cameras, carry their own stories. Just as he wandered the world with his cameras, I’ve taken them as far east as Thailand and as far north as Iceland, capturing black sands, gigantic glaciers and millennia-old temples on film. Atop Kerið, a volcanic crater, I thought of him and wept as the camera shuttered a 35mm photo.
Carrying his cameras is not only a reminder of the life he lived, but the life photography has taken in mine since his passing. Although I began photography unaware of his artistic affinities, his work and equipment spur me on, keepsakes of a life well lived.
Working at The Battalion, I found purpose in my photography. Under the guidance of Ishika, Kyle, Chris and Hannah, my photos gained intentionality, and over time, I found my voice. At the same time, I retrace the steps of my father through Aggieland and my grandfather through the photos I take of it.
When I’m asked why I work at The Batt, I often respond by showing pictures of my work, ranging from the game-winning Nate Boerkircher catch versus Notre Dame, beep baseball or Muster. I’m quick to share photos and my stories, capturing them, detailing the buildup, the decisive moment and the emotional aftermath. In my passion for communicating the drama of the moment captured in still photo, I often forget to emphasize why I capture those moments in the first place.
To amend those lapses, I write the following.
Through my life experience, I have found it best to preserve the beauty of life and the people who live it in the frame of a photo. Cameras capture an instant, freezing a moment in a shutter and a feeling forever. In my struggle to communicate the beauty of life, the pain of death and every emotion in between with words, I use a camera instead. My craft has evolved through the course of cataloging my time as an Aggie, but that journey is ending soon. I will remember my time here forever, and if forever isn’t enough, I’ve got more than a few photos of it to spare.
