Hi This is Annie Speaking.

Nice to meet you! How are you doing? This feels like a more fun place than a newsletter. It’s 1:38am in New York, September 23rd, 2025, and this is the very first letter I’m writing to you.

So, what should I talk about? Maybe this site itself. I’ve procrastinated for a year, never fully “finished” it, but figured I’d just hit publish anyway. There aren’t even as many photos here as on my Instagram. A lot of pictures have already vanished into the endless sea of the internet—just tiny grains of sand from an old era of mine.

What does photography mean to me? It’s so much more than a major, a skill, or a job. It’s fused with me—it’s part of who I am. During application season, I wrote: Photography is something I simply cannot separate from my life. It’s what I’ll spend three hours on every day no matter what. Even if I don’t like the subject, even if I don’t like the person I’m photographing, I’ll still do it—because pressing the shutter, and what it represents, matters to me.

Because of my laziness and terrible memory, I’ve almost never shared my work outside of IG or WeChat. I’ve never entered contests, done exhibitions, or made books. I realized the happiest thing isn’t the photos themselves—it’s the process of shooting them. From covering random events just to get it over with, to shooting last year’s Olympics and actually feeling like I got something meaningful… from sneaking into theaters to photograph stage productions and trying to capture the emotions of a play, to building a portfolio stuffed with philosophy, moods, and humanity. Staying up all night chasing comets and meteor showers I probably couldn’t capture. Running from Dunhuang to Luoyang to Tibet because I wanted to photograph Buddha sculptures. Wanting clearer images, bigger images, more fun images, images with more meaning. Wanting a new camera. Wanting to prove—to myself—that I’m different from people who just casually pick up a camera.

At one point I said that covering school events was my IB “mission”—because humans needed me. Later I cut myself off from event photography almost completely, but it left such a deep mark on me that now I barely shoot portraits, except for very staged ones.

Photography entered my life like a savior, dragged me into the abyss, and in the end became inseparable from me, part of my body. So I’ll leave these words here.