Your cultural identity is where you come from. When most people ask you that question, they are not trying to incite an existential crisis; they just want to understand what your life with a camera looks like.  Do you take pictures of elephants, icebergs, or weddings?  For the sake of conversation, they would like to have some idea as to what you do.  It is innocent enough, but it can create a bit of internal turmoil, or at least it did for me.

When someone asks us about who we consider ourselves to be, it can create a range of emotions.  For me, the question pointed to a gap in my professional career.  I could not exactly put my finger on what I was doing.  For a few years, I used to say I did ‘documentary photography,’ but the term never sat well with me.  It never seemed to get at the root of my work, nor did it shed light on my approach, which I’ve always seen as different from documentary work because it is not objective.  I am personally fascinated by people’s points of view and try to express my projects from my point of view, not an objective one.