I am not a photographer.  If I were a photographer, I would be a third-generation one in my family.  But the line needed to be broken.  I grew up with one foot in my father’s studio, with the smell of the darkroom steeped into my clothes, playing with hand-me-down cameras, learning the craft naturally, as fish learn to swim.  There was no romance in this lifestyle.  As immigrant business owners, practicing portrait photography, my parents struggled, and I wanted no part of that struggle.  I moved away from this life as far as I could, literally and figuratively. I became a doctor and a teacher, and I loved every minute of it.  But then, there was this camera.  It was an old thing, sitting there in the back of the drawer.   I got it from my father years ago, as usual, because the flash terminal burned out—too expensive to fix.  It smelled like home.  It was a voice that needed to be voiced.  It demanded space in my life, claiming the mindshare that it staked out so long ago.  Since then, whenever I stray from the practice of photography, because of career, duty, money, kids, “commitments,” etc., it keeps pulling me back.  I am not a photographer.  But photography is a need, obsession, frustration, joy, compulsion, therapy, time-suck, comfort, risk, and it will haunt me as long as I live.