Natasha Gerschon has this memory of being seven years old, holding her grandmother’s camcorder and being acutely aware of everything in the frame. The pace of what she was recording had to be just right. She would carefully steady the handheld video camera so her shots didn’t look shaky.

As much as she loved capturing stories, she assumed her creativity would be reserved for recording family get-togethers.

“Growing up in South America, being an artist is almost out of the question,” she says. “It’s something you do as a hobby. You have to be a doctor, an architect or a lawyer to make a living. I never thought I could make photography, or anything that was artistic, part of my professional career.”

Gerschon painted and sculpted, but it wasn’t until she was in Grade 9 – her family having moved from Argentina to Canada – that she was fully exposed to photography. She took a class and learned the technical ins-and-outs as well as how to develop her own film. She fell in love with the process.

After high school, she applied to the visual and creative arts program at Sheridan College. Two years in, knowing photography was her path, she switched programs. “It was another learning process, just taking the knowledge I had from other mediums and putting it into photography,” she says. “I never considered myself a great painter or sculptor. With photography, I could do all of the above just with taking a photo. I was like, ‘This is it for me.’ It filled what I wanted to do with just one medium.”