the meaning of photography in my life

For a feature in an online magazine, I was asked to tell what photography means to me. So here it is:

I am a theatre major, and as such, I am taught to see the world in stage pictures and in my contribution to the work as a whole. Life is an ensemble piece. That is what photography is to me. It’s my contribution to this slice of the world that I am living in, through portraits of my friends, self-portraits that articulate the character of me, and film photographs that lend depth to the quiet moments of my life. Theatre is ephemeral; it is over as soon as it is performed. But photography is something I can keep forever, frozen exactly the same way as the moment in which I saw it.