If you’re in your 20’s, you’re licensed to live without direction. That’s what I’ve been told. Like my favourite Jamie Cullim’s song, 20 something, your 20’s is a decade of figuring things out, of exploring. Friends in the 20’s bracket concur. Most of them are still investigating what they want to dedicate their lives to building.

My explorations took me from the Natal surfing retreat where I grew up and through the tweeded academia of Rhodes University. From sitting under the stoics of journalism who battled grassroots revolution through Apartheid, I was hired to scaffold the dreams of a Cosmopolitan Dubai and sell the results of its frenzied construction. I cut my ties with Dubai, only to spend cold 4am mornings lost on a bus somewhere between London’s Lester Square and Wimbledon Village. Eventually something tied me down to Cape Town’s windy city basin. Along the way I worked as waiter, printer, construction foreman, DJ, writer, lighting techie with a collection of black shirts, brand manager with a collection of blue shits, sales agent, marketer, sound engineer, business developer, web builder, event organizer, scuba diver, graphic designer and part-time band member. I remember one interview starting with “Well, Andrew, it seems you have quiet a checkered history”. Contrary to Alain De Botton‘s new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, “Most of us are still working at jobs chosen for us by our sixteen-year-old selves”, I choose to try everything. Like some unyielding Rubix Cube, I tested a myriad of combinations of life, work and passion. Only when I started taking my photography seriously did the combination really click.

Being a photographer is like being a poet or a gardener, there are no real barriers to entry. There is no comprehensive SWOT analysis on maintaining a competitive edge. The real evidence that you need to continue your work comes from internal signals and you trust that somehow the economics will follow. Signals are hard to predict. Like when you get so excited about an idea your hands start shaking and the girlfriend asks you to please stop pacing your little 1-bedroom apartment in Wembley Square. It’s a signal. The completely drowning satisfaction of knowing there are 500 thousand hard copies of your imagination in print. It’s a signal.

I torture myself with these little age calculations of success, guessing if I’m too old to ‘be international’ and I’ve missed my chance. Richard Avedon was 21 when he was first published in Harper’s Bazaar. Richard Brandson was age 30 when he started selling records in London out of the boot of his car. Mario Sorrenti was 21 when he first shot his girlfriend, Kate Moss, for seventeen magazine and then the Iconic CK Obsession campaign in 1993 which launched both their international careers. Steven Miesel got his big break at age 26. And at age 37 Napoleon was French Emperor and dominated Central Europe. So, I think to myself, at least I’ve got 10 years on Napoleon.

The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries