We recently connected with Vanshika Jain and have shared our conversation below.

Vanshika, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

I don’t think I’d ever have a moment where being an artist will not make me happy; growing up as a self-taught artist, I have always been surrounded by a variety of art forms which led it to becoming my little world of happiness. Through the ever-evolving phases of life, I stumbled upon visual arts – photography, specifically – and in no time fell so much in love with it that I decided to receive formal education in the field to be able to turn my passion into a full-time profession and make a living out of. Being a creative individual allows me to create things that were once only a thought in my brain, and have new perspectives to life; the way art and photography make me feel alive is something I won’t ever give up because it makes me want to challenge myself to keep growing and in those regards I’m not scared of being wherever it takes me as long as I get to do what I love with all my heart. To sum up the feeling – I’d happily choose being an artist over and over again in a heartbeat every single day for not just this lifetime but all other ones I might have despite any obstacles that could hinder my journey.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Born and brought up in New Delhi, India, I moved to the United States to receive formal education; I earned my B.FA. in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA. While I had never been academically gifted when it came to math and science, the one thing I always enjoyed and found myself stuck to had been anything art-related which led me to exploring and experimenting with the various media that was available to me. Soon after stumbling upon photography, I just immediately knew that I had found my happy place and throughout my journey of learning the craft I only fell deeper in love with everything about the lens-based art form. While I am working as a freelance photographer, actively looking for new opportunities, the one thing I’d want my potential clients to know is that to me photography is more than just a profession to pay bills – it is my child that I want to keep growing with and so I hold it very close to my heart which makes me want to give not just my 100% but more than that at every step of the way; this is something that sets me apart as well since I know what it has been like to move away from my home, family and the entire life I had growing up to a place where I had to restart as a nobody only so I could formalize a passion that makes me feel alive.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

There’s definitely a lot of things that non-creatives struggle to understand about the journey of creatives just as the vice-versa. As a creative, every single piece of work that I create starts with a thought in the head and because of that there is no space for ‘one size fits all’ – every photograph I make will be unique and the same ‘solution’ will only apply to one problem unlike in some fields where one solution can be the answer to several similar problems.
Furthermore, I really wish more people understood and respected the fact that artists, even though, have been blessed with a creative cognition for their specific field, it still takes a lot of planning, research, ideating, hard work and investment in terms of time, energy and money to learn and master the technicalities which allow them to be able to create anything; at the end of the day, artists, too, have bills to pay and it is disrespectful to expect them to make something for free just because they’re ‘good’ at it.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Never having been academically gifted, I always found myself struggling in school and running away from the confrontations with my teachers; add to that low health conditions every now and then led to quite some years of spiralling down to an all-time low which impacted my entire functioning – mentally, spiritually, physically and emotionally I had reached a point in life where I questioned my own worth and if I’ll ever be able to do anything at all in life. During the year of the pandemic when I had the time to simply sit at home and do nothing at all, there was an emptiness in me which felt disturbing and had me feeling restless to the point I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror anymore. Over a few years after it, I was functioning, or at least trying to, but it still didn’t feel like me and through constant support from my parents I soon learnt to take one step at a time to work on myself first before anything else even if that meant delaying the ‘milestones’ of life which the society expects of you to have achieved by a certain age. Fast forward a few years from then to today, I did a full 180 turnaround to be in the best of shape in all aspects from health and well-being to career and relationships; I knew that my ultimate goal in life is to work hard enough to make my parents proud and be able to make all their wishes come true because they are the reason I stand tall as a strong and resilient woman today who has been blessed with the opportunities to achieve everything that my heart desires.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jainvanshika.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/v.jainphoto/