Skagway Gallery!

              After months of hard work and planning, and years of taking photographs, my first gallery is now open in Skagway, AK!  Opening the gallery has been of the best and most challenging things I have ever done.  I'm use to preparing for months of the road and living out of my car, but planning to have a storefront with my images was way harder.  There were so many little things to think of that make a huge difference in the look and feel of the gallery and how the images are displayed.  After months and months of preparation, I was just ready to get all of my images to Alaska and set up and be done with the preparing part.  

               On April 18th, my dad and I left Tullahoma, TN and began the very long drive north to Alaska.  In all it was 3,500 miles, 65 hours, and 4 full days of driving to get to Skagway.  We were both exhausted when we arrived, but began setting up early the next morning.  It was a bumpy ride across Canada on the Alkan highway, and over half of my framed pictures had corners broken.  I figured a few might be dinged, but over half?  We found an all around handy fixer rope with corners, and amazingly it was able to fix all of my frames! This was a huge sigh of relief, because I wasn't sure what I was going to do otherwise.  

              As the gallery came together more and more each day, my excitement grew.  My dream was becoming reality of opening my own gallery.  From the beginning of my photography career, I always enjoyed the fine art side of photography more so than the editorial or photojournalism side.  In the past few years I began to look around towns and scope out areas that I thought might be a place where I could have a gallery.  I didn't think it would happen this year, but I found a great opportunity and went for it, and now I have a gallery in Alaska.  The summer will continue to be a learning experience of things to change, prove on, and what works and doesn't work for a gallery store.  I'm excited to learn those things and see how the summer and my first gallery go.  I'm very excited about this next phase in my photography career!

What my gallery space looked like when we showed up.

What my gallery space looked like when we showed up.

Finished gallery view from the front.

Finished gallery view from the front.

Finished gallery view from the back.

Finished gallery view from the back.