We recently connected with Meg Viken and have shared our conversation below.

Meg, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

Time is an interesting thing to think about.

I started my professional career as a photographer just after completing my BFA at Minnesota State University – Moorhead, but I wouldn’t say that I was truly on my career path as a creative until many years later. I wouldn’t change my timeline, and I believe I am better for the hills and valleys that I’ve met on this journey.

Like many artists, I left art school with a drive to monetize my craft. Afterall, I had just scored a piece of paper to keep as a looming reminder that, unless I started making some serious moolah, I was going to be eating mac n cheese with veggie dogs for the foreseeable future. As a freshly dipoloma-ed photographer, I was especially interested in experimental, fine art photography, but the clearer, more well trodden route was to become a portrait photographer. So, that’s where I went. I found out quickly that this was not a career for the lighthearted, and even though I started making some money at it, I only lasted about one year shooting families, seniors and weddings. After I crashed and burned, I tucked my tail and sold all my digital gear. Airbrushing zits off seventeen year olds was gladly in my rear view.

Fast forward to 2018. Following my existential dilemma, I had gone on to a full-time career in public recreation. In my role as an aquatics manager for a public university, I was able to use my creativity in new ways that challenged and stretched me every single day. I didn’t feel like I was missing any pieces of myself, because my need for creating was being met at work. How cool, right?! Well, as we know, some good things must come to an end. After a change in university leadership, I found myself scrambling for an out at my nine to five, and I found it, through a parks and recreation department across the country, in a suburb of Seattle.

After moving across the country, I began working on a team which severely constricted my ability to creatively flow in my day to day. New job, new digs, new people, new expectations. Everything was just so overwhelming. As I was simultaneously imploding under the pressure of my work, I was bursting at the seams with unexpressed, big, giant emotions. In that window of time, I met a local Seattle artist through a mutual friend. We immediately connected and talked at length about creative energy, creative passions and the like. Through those conversations, I realized that I had abandoned a huge chunk of myself, and that chunk needed to be welcomed home to mama with some TLC. Completely on impulse, in fall of 2019, I found my old plastic fantastic, Diana F+, and picked up a pack of medium format Ilford Delta 3200. And herein, lies the start. Four years later and I’ve accomplished things I’d never dreamed were possible.

It feels so cliche to say, but I don’t regret anything. I wouldn’t change the timeline, the failures, the lessons, the accomplishments, the pain, the rebirth, the doubts, the expression. None of it. If I had sped up the process, or made different moves, I wouldn’t be the me I am right now. And now, all I have is what’s in front of me. At the end of the day, I’m eternally grateful that I still have moments to be fully creative and fully present, and I intend to do my best to make sure I’m not letting any of those moments pass me by.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a small-town kid, turned film photographer and writer based in Seattle.

I was brought up in a home where I was not allowed to adequately express my feelings. Either I was too loud, or too abrasive, or too dramatic, or just plain too much. So, from a very young age, I had unknowingly been fighting to feel not-so-stifled. By necessity, I learned to express myself through other means. From the time I could ride my bike to the elementary school nearby, I tried every class, club and team that allowed me to be creative. Many disciplines that have been with me since my youth and adolescence, still greatly inform my creative work today. Theater, dance, sculpture, music, film, cooking, printmaking, poetry, and the list goes on. Because of my early experiences in the world, I learned to believe that creativity is a way of life, a different way of seeing, a choice that we make each day – to create and express ourselves, rather than staying passively stifled, reacting to others’ creations and expressions.

In 2019, following a five year separation from my photographic career, I rediscovered my intentional journey of becoming an artist. Between then and now, I’ve reimagined what it means to be a creative, became an internationally published photographer, and produced a full body of experimental photographic work. In June/July 2022, at Whippersnapper Gallery and Events in Seattle, my first solo exhibition, along with my self-produced book, “Sense of Self. A Collection of Thoughts and Images by Meagan Viken”, was released to the public. Viewers enjoyed a wall of dreamy, fire-destructed polaroids, ghostly double exposures, and a collection of formative works speaking to heavier topics, such as women’s bodies and mental health.

Today, as I reflect on the progress I’ve made since re-establishing my relationship with the art world, I realize that I’m standing at the threshold of a new beginning. Much of my former work will be archived in a few short days, leaving ample room for new, exciting opportunities ahead. Moving into this new phase, I am mostly working in experimental photography and alternative processes. Heavily inspired by the beautifully explorative and delicately human works of Sally Mann, Imogen Cunningham, Man Ray, and Saul Leiter, I’m hoping to dabble in storytelling and creating women-focused narratives through imagery. Maybe this project will take me two weeks, maybe it will span a decade or more. Regardless what happens, I’m uninterested in speculating timelines, and I’m fully ready for the journey.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

In art school, you are creating with the intention of meeting someone else’s expectations; for the grade, right? I can say, that in the whole of art school, I produced, maybe, three projects that actually felt like Me. Then I graduated, and immediately followed all of my peers and put my art presence on social media. Again. I was producing for a heart that was not my own. I was producing work to fit into some arbitrary box that I had deemed to be “the right way”. Over the years, I have learned and unlearned and failed and then relearned and then failed some more and then tried again at this very lesson: You CANNOT authentically express yourself if you are attempting to meet the creative expectation of another. To understand this idea is only the first part. We can all logically understand, “My value should not be tied to what others think of me, but how I think of myself.” But it is an entirely different challenge to put that idea into practice. While I have gotten much better at making art FOR me. I still fail at this all the time. And that’s ok.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I don’t have a huge presence on social media, but what I do have, that I think is far more valuable than 124.6K followers, is an amazing, engaged community of creatives.

When I started my social media page, I totally fell for the insane marketing scheme that is IG. You all know the drill: “Get your likes up. Make sure you’re commenting. Ope, can’t forget to post every day. Come up with 30 relevant hashtags per post. WAIT! Not too relevant, or you won’t be seen.” It’s insanity!

It wasn’t until I got involved in a photobook project with Bonnie Doman, a photographer and creative director based in London, that I realized I was going about this thing all wrong. She showed me the importance of authenticity and posting only the things that truly mattered to me.

When I made this conscious switch on my platforms – started sharing humanness, started sharing what mattered – I started getting messages like this:

“I came across your profile by chance and immediately fell in love with it! Your art is amazing and takes my breath away. I’m very shy, I have no self-confidence and I’m following a course of psychotherapy to solve some issues of my mental health…I live everyday with self doubt and many wrong thoughts. But looking at you art and the way you express, emphasize and softly show your body and soul makes me dream, and believe that someday I can learn to accept me and express the fact that I’m a human being.”

Now, almost daily, I get to have real, connected, vulnerable conversations with people from all over the world. There is a lot of bad to say about social media, and I recognize an unending amount of toxicity and harm can come from media, but I never would get to build relationships with so many amazing people had it not been for the good ol’ inbox.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.meaganviken.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mvikenexperimental