The day photographer Leigh Busby stopped waiting for permission to believe he belonged.
By Jarvus Ricardo Hester
There comes a moment in every artist’s life when talent is no longer the question.
Belief is.
It’s an invisible threshold.
A place where your résumé says you’ve arrived…
your peers say you’ve arrived…
your mentors say you’ve arrived…
but the voice in your own head is still asking,
“What am I doing here?”
Leigh Busby knows that feeling well.
Long before his photographs appeared in museum exhibitions, on magazine covers, inside Yale Theatre productions, and at some of the country’s most prestigious sporting events, he was simply a young man fascinated by pictures.
Or more accurately…
by seeing.
Not everyone understands the difference.
Photography has never really been about cameras.
Painters will tell you that brushes don’t create masterpieces.
Musicians will remind you that violins don’t write symphonies.
And photographers?
The best ones know that cameras don’t make photographs.
Eyes do.
Lee’s eyes were trained long before he ever owned the equipment he once dreamed about.
It happened inside an art classroom in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Her name was Betty Turner.
A soft-spoken art teacher with an extraordinary ability to recognize gifts before their owners recognized them themselves.
She didn’t begin by teaching Leigh how to draw faces.
She began with something much simpler.
A strip of paper.
“I want you to go from the darkest black to the lightest gray,” she told him.
“But I don’t want anyone to know where one ends and the other begins.”
It sounded like an art assignment.
It wasn’t.
She was training his eyes.
Every day she placed fashion magazines like Vogue into his hands.
Not so he could admire the clothing.
So he could study light.
Shadow.
Texture.
Contrast.
“She always told me she was training my eyes to see,” Leigh recalled.
Eventually she handed him black-and-white portraits.
“I want you to draw this,” she said.
Not interpret it.
Not improve it.
Match it.
Friends would stop in the hallway, staring back and forth between the magazine photograph and Lee’s pencil drawing.
“Which one is the real one?”
That was the first time he realized seeing was a skill.
Years later, his teacher looked at him and made a prediction that felt almost impossible.
“You’re going to be famous one day.”
Lee laughed.
She didn’t.
“You have the eyes.”
For decades, those words stayed with him.
In fact, they became the foundation of his identity.
His photography brand would eventually carry the name…
Eyes Gifted by God.
Because before anyone praised his photographs…
someone first taught him how to see.
Like many artists, however, talent arrived long before confidence.
Lee remembers attending one of his cousin’s runway shows.
His cousin, fashion designer Kim Lawrence, had transformed the venue into something resembling the Sahara Desert.
Sand covered the floor.
Guests sat surrounded by Middle Eastern-inspired décor while dates and traditional foods completed the experience.
Professional photographers had already been hired.
Lee wasn’t one of them.
He was simply family.
Camera in hand, he quietly asked if he could stand off to the side and practice photographing the runway.
Nobody expected much.
Least of all Leigh.
When the show ended and the photographs were reviewed, something unexpected happened.
The images selected for the designer’s promotional catalog weren’t the ones captured by the hired professionals.
They were Lee’s.
“I was just there as family,” he told me with a smile.
Sometimes life introduces us to ourselves before we’re ready.
Years later, another dream quietly became reality.
He found himself photographing the U.S. Olympic Trials.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with photographers whose work had appeared in Sports Illustrated, at Olympic Games, NBA Finals, and world championships.
Lee looked around.
Then looked down at his camera.
“I remember saying to one of the photographers,” he laughed,
“I’m not really a professional.”
The man looked at him for a moment, almost confused.
Then he pointed toward the photographers surrounding them.
“Look who’s standing beside you.”
Sports Illustrated.
Olympic photographers.
Veterans who had covered the biggest sporting events on Earth.
Then he smiled.
“You here.”
Three words.
That was all.
No motivational speech.
No dramatic pep talk.
Just an undeniable truth.
If you didn’t belong…
you wouldn’t be standing there.
Artists spend years waiting for permission.
Sometimes they don’t realize they’ve already received it.
Ironically, the moment Leigh finally began believing in himself didn’t come from a camera assignment.
It came from an athlete.
Olympic wrestling champion Jordan Burroughs.
Lee had spent years photographing wrestling competitions.
Following athletes.
Documenting their stories.
When he approached Jordan during an event, he expected to introduce himself.
Instead…
Jordan greeted him first.
“Leigh Busby.”
Lee froze.
“How do you know my name?”
Jordan laughed.
“Because I follow you.”
Imagine spending your career photographing greatness…
only to discover…
greatness had been following your work all along.
That moment says everything about Leigh Busby.
Not because a famous athlete recognized him.
But because it revealed something artists often struggle to believe.
While they’re busy wondering whether their work matters…
someone is already being inspired by it.
Today, Lee continues pursuing new creative frontiers.
His next dream isn’t another magazine cover.
It’s stepping behind the scenes of major motion pictures, documenting the moments audiences never see.
The quiet conversations.
The controlled chaos.
The artistry that exists between “Action!” and “Cut!”
Knowing Leigh…
I suspect it won’t remain a dream for long.
After all…
a little art teacher once handed a young boy a Vogue magazine and asked him to draw what he saw.
She wasn’t really teaching him to sketch.
She was teaching him to notice.
To observe.
To trust his eyes.
And perhaps that’s the greatest lesson any artist can ever learn.
Not how to create.
But how to truly see.
Because cameras change.
Technology evolves.
Styles come and go.
But the ability to see beauty where others overlook it…
That gift never goes out of style.
by Jarvus Ricardo Hester
photo credit: Leigh Busby
