Photography : Tamara Lee
BelAtelier is full of romance and nostalgia, of rosiness and sepia, of golden light and soft breezes. Fragments of beauty remembered and savoured.
tamara lee – wind song
It’s a far cry from the real life of Tamara Lee, who said she worked as a data entry clerk for 10 years. She remembers coming home after a long day and having a good cry because it wasn’t what she had hoped her life would be like. “I didn’t even know what I wanted. In a way, I started adulthood backwards. I had a baby before I had a degree, a career, a home or a husband. I finished college with help from family and immediately took the first job that would take me. I was grateful, but it wasn’t ideal.”
tamara lee – dreaming of spring
However, all that has changed. Recently, she left the day job and has taken the plunge; “now its sink or swim.”
“I still consider myself an amateur photographer, and I don’t really know when I’ll lose that term. I don’t know when one considers themselves a professional.
“About 2 years ago, I had a Canon Rebel that I knew very little about. It sat around in storage for a while and came out a little for family functions. A friend told me about Etsy, so a little later, I checked it out. I was inspired to see people selling photography and I thought “I can do that”. So I did.
“Though it started very matter-of-factly, I take it very seriously. It’s every day, almost every moment. As a child, I took a lot of film photography and I would take pictures of anything. My father told people I would take pictures of the grass growing.”
tamara lee – from the vine
tamara lee – summer love
She understands only too well the competitiveness of the field she is in, and the hardest thing for her has been developing a profile. “It seems now that photographers are coming out from every corner of the world and I think it’s easy to fade out into the background. Developing my own voice has been the challenge. I’m in love with photography in general so I have genuine appreciation of most styles, though I tend to favor moodier images, devoid of color and a bit ethereal.”
In fact, she told me she dislikes colour. What do you think? Can you tell?
tamara lee – the eye
While her own dedicated creative space is under construction (in fact, it’s still in the design to-do stages), Tamara views the world around her as her office. “Bel Atelier is still evolving. It’s not close to perfection, but as time passes, and different phases of my life occur, I hope it will bring about a portfolio that will document that. I named it ‘Bel Atelier’ because it means ‘beautiful workshop’ in French ~ ‘Beautiful Office’ just didn’t sound that good.”
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You can find more of Tamara’s images in her Etsy Shop, BelAtelier.