Dear friends,
I feel as though I owe where I am today to the double rainbow of experiences I’ve collected over my lifetime. It wasn’t always that I had dreams of being a photojournalist, it’s more just how things kind of coalesced into this perfect sense.
My stint as a performing musician.
It all began about a decade ago when I signed up for my very first Livejournal. For those of you who don’t know, Livejournal is a Russia-based blogging site that preceded Blogspot and Wordpress. It’s a platform that is still very much alive, whereas, regretfully, my own Livejournal is not. There was something about the culture of blogging back then that helped me to really come into myself. Gushing all of my thoughts into something others could read offered a certain catharsis. This eventually led to the sharing of photos from my daily life to accompany the text. It almost became a fixation to craft entries for my readers. I would do things in my real life and think to myself sometimes, “I can’t wait to Livejournal about this.” This era piqued my interest in photography and I thirsted for something I couldn’t put my finger on.
A glimpse into Livejournal.
As I went through the motions in journalism school, it wasn’t until second year that the material really gripped me. I had my first introduction to television broadcast class and it opened me up to an electrifying world of visuals, so different than those nights I spent squinting at the CP Stylebook. I followed this intrigue into an internship at CTV and CBC News at Six in Ottawa but realized by the end of it all that it still wasn’t quite right.
(Wo)Manning the CTV news desk.
I entered the world of video documentary in my last year of school and completed the National Film Board’s DocShop program. It felt closer to what I wanted to do but at the time I didn’t know where to take it. There was also one newspaper class during my degree that glossed over photojournalism but it still wasn’t enough.
Shooting on location during my DocShop documentary.
After graduating I worked a few government jobs in communications and corporate relations to bide time. I’m really glad I had that experience because after it, I knew I never wanted to do it again. I yearned to spread my wings and use the parts of my brain that were atrophying with each passing strategy session.
My short-lived career as a National Research Council lab coat model.
Cue Loyalist College fast track. Fast forward to internships at the Ottawa Citizen and the Toronto Star and now we’re up to speed.
At last: a career that felt wholly fulfilling. A career that embodied most if not all of the things I liked about the other jobs. What I didn’t necessarily realize back then was that it was the storytelling, regardless of the format, that was always so satisfying.
Sincerely,
Sarah Dea
www.sarahdea.com
sarahdea@gmail.com
