Deb Achak is a West Seattle-based fine-art photographer. After living in various neighborhoods around the peninsula for almost two decades, in 2013 she and her husband bought and renovated the former Villa Heidelberg B&B along Erskine Way, where they now reside with their two sons, and where she works from her home photography studio. Last year Deb had her first solo fine-art photography exhibition in New York City, and also oversaw the publication of a new monograph: “All The Colors That I Am Inside.” West Seattle Blog senior contributor Christopher Boffoli recently sat down with Deb – who was fresh from travels in the Himalayas, where she was shooting her next project – to talk about how she came to photography, her connection to West Seattle, and the power of intuition.

(All images courtesy Deb Achak Photography)

By Christopher Boffoli
West Seattle Blog senior contributor

Deb Achak didn’t nurture childhood dreams of becoming a visual artist. She didn’t employ Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-hour rule” in pursuit of a life with a camera in her hands. In fact, you wouldn’t know from looking at the stunning, painterly fine-art images that she produces, that she came to photography fairly late in life, in what she has characterized as a “sudden and demanding compulsion.”

As someone who actually did start young, who has spent decades working at photography, and who still frequently fails at it, it’s hard to not be a bit envious. After all, we photographers can be a competitive lot. Observing Deb’s work often feels like eavesdropping on a conversation of someone particularly eloquent and perceptive. While photography may not have been in her early plans, some of the experiences of her childhood would inform the creative work that would come.

As a girl growing up in Amherst, New Hampshire, a creative career was the furthest thing from her mind. Neither of her parents were exceptionally creative. Both worked long hours supporting the family. There simply wasn’t anyone in her world who provided a blueprint for a career in the arts. Sometimes, though, life has a subtle way of illuminating things that we will circle back on later, even if we’re not initially conscious of it: like acorns that rain down around us, never knowing which ones will find purchase, seek out rays of sun, and later send up green shoots.

“My mother was a crafter. She was a quilter, “ says Deb. “She sewed clothes for us, did needlepoint, made stained glass. But we didn’t think of her as an artist. She worked as an HR director and she did these things at home.” Deb saw these endeavors as hobbies, apart from work life. “I figured you’d always have creative hobbies and then you’d have a real job.”

Deb’s childhood summers were a time of light. New Hampshire isn’t really known for its coastline, all 15 miles of it (18 miles by the most generous estimates). The state’s limited seashore is underwhelming as beaches go. But in the eyes of a child, it might as well have been the French Riviera. Like a lot of blue-collar families in the area, Deb’s spent time during their summers at Hampton Beach.

It’s perhaps not much different now than it was in the ’80s. One might not hear the same “woca-woca-woca” sound of Pac-Man spilling out of the arcades, but across the narrow ribbon of beach, and beyond the gray asphalt perpetually jammed with cars, you’re likely to find the same clam shacks and fried dough stands, T-shirt and souvenir shops, salt-water taffy vendors and people playing Skee-Ball. “We didn’t go to fancy beaches. That’s how we grew up. We didn’t have money.” Deb says that she mostly remembered it as “crowds of people relaxed and at ease, enjoying the ocean.” For what it lacked in luxury, it more than made up in sensory stimulation.

Later she would major in English at the University of New Hampshire, with an minor in studio art. But she claims the latter was more of a casual interest and never something that she imagined as a vocation. “I didn’t have any example of working artists. It wasn’t even on my radar.”

Like many who finished college at the end of the (first) Bush administration, a deep recession made for a challenging job market. Despite working multiple jobs, Deb just found she wasn’t surviving. “So I saved every penny and moved to the West Coast because a friend had moved here.”

Seeking adventure – and hopefully employment – Deb moved to Seattle in 1992. That version of the city would look largely unfamiliar to those moving here now. At the time, though, it seemed to suddenly be on the cultural radar of the world, in the midst of the white-hot success of the grunge music genre. Around this time, Starbucks had its IPO with around 165 total locations. AIDS deaths were still on the rise and Amazon was just a river in South America. Microsoft Windows was on its third version. “Sleepless in Seattle” was filming in town and Cameron Crowe‘s film “Singles” was screening in theaters. The Kingdome was still the city’s main sports and entertainment venue.

Deb couch-surfed with a friend for a while as she scrambled to work multiple jobs including waiting tables, staffing a catering company, and taking on cleaning jobs. At the same time she was diligent about sending out resumes and watching for openings. At length she found more promising prospects in a listing at Harborview, counseling victims at what was then called the sexual-assault center. She soondiscovered that she had a facility for the work, and found it fulfilling. This led her to similar work as a patient-care coordinator at a clinic at the University of Washington, where she liaised with physicians and nurses, helping with coordination between the medical side and law enforcement in pursuing sexual-assault cases. For a while she considered careers in law, or medicine, or mental health. But ultimately she chose social work, pursuing a master’s degree at UW.

Around the same time that she started working on her master’s, she met Ramin, the man who would become her husband. By the end of the ’90s, they decided it was time to buy a house, which led them to West Seattle. Over the next fifteen years they lived in several neighborhoods on the peninsula, during which time they became parents. Looking for something more spacious, they fell in love with the former Villa Heidelberg, which they bought (in 2013) and then spent years meticulously renovating. The exquisite result of that project has been featured in design magazines.

Deb’s transition from a challenging, if fulfilling, career in social work, into motherhood, and then into a multi-year house renovation project, progressively led her to picking up a camera. At first, she says, it was – like it is for a lot of parents – about documenting the childhood of her small children. But as much as she found cameraphones to be convenient, she quickly found herself chafing against the limits of the technology. “I just wanted something better to shoot with,” she says. After her husband gave her a compact Canon DSLR as a gift, her interest was supercharged. “I went everywhere with that camera. I really fell down the rabbit hole. I read the manual and taught myself everything that I possibly could.” Deb says that she set up an account on Flickr, which was very popular around that time, taught herself editing software, and joined every photo club she could find.

Soon after discovering this passion, Deb had an instinct to do something with a package of delicate optics and electronics that maybe wouldn’t be so intuitive to most: she wanted to submerge it in seawater. That risky decision fortunately would not end in disaster. In fact, it became the genesis of her first official series of elevated fine-art images.

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