Whitney on Whitney:

I’m interested in old things, broken things, deteriorated and abandoned things. I just want to find places that are desolate and blown apart and totally ruined and take pictures of them. I like things that are out of place. I do a lot of photography with my mom, so sometimes we’ll just drive around looking for places that are interesting. We spend a lot of our time in graveyards. I like the idea that something that’s been left behind can be more beautiful than it was before.

Photography was always around me. My grandpa and mom are both photographers. I would try to take pictures of things when I was younger, but in ninth grade I really started wanting to take real pictures.

Sometimes I’m just not in the mood, because photography is not something I can do if I’m not seeing out of the right eyes or not in the right mind-set. If I’m not in a good enough place emotionally or mentally to see it, I can’t do it. I feel like if I’m thinking too hard about something, then it can come off as too contrived.

When I’m set on taking pictures, I’m usually looking for things that I can find to take pictures of as they are. I feel as if I changed things I would take away from the nature of what it was in the first place. Some of the photos I like best are from things that I happened across, that I didn’t do a thing to orchestrate or change.

I plan to continue doing photography, not as a career but as a hobby. I would consider taking photography as a career if I could find something I was really satisfied with. It makes me happy to know that it’s one of the things I can say I’m kind of good at.

Pictured: Untitled, photography

--As told to Caroline Wallace, St. Petersburg High