Revitalized Devotion

Interview with Andrew Florin

So… why Porsche?

Although I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, a healthy part of my childhood was spent around Southern California car culture, specifically the Porsche community. I would later find out that my birth heralded a Porsche dry-spell for my dad, who sold his early 911 in favor of a sturdy and family-oriented Volvo 240, only to return to the promised land several years later after purchasing my grandfather’s 1986 Grand Prix White 3.2 Carrera. As an aloof and high-energy kid, I went with my dad to countless LA auto shows, Monterey historics, ANDIAL gatherings, Dunkel Bros events, German Autofests, cars and coffee events, Rennsport Reunions - I think you get the idea.  At these events, I saw a different side of my dad, a hard-working, honest, and mild-mannered man who I suspected had things to say but preferred quietude, and who, in these moments, seemed to come most alive.  At a fundamental level, you could say that my pursuit within the Porsche community is an inward dive into a father-son relationship, and for which I think many people can relate.

Having said that, I am extremely lucky that of all things, my dad at a young age began to focus on such a singular marque.  The racing heritage speaks for itself, which is something I’ve enjoyed learning about, and the constant,  nuanced improvements the engineers made over each production year, speaks to a passion that so evidently has translated into an unparalleled community of owners and enthusiasts.  I make that distinction, because although I do not own one yet, the community at large has been exceedingly generous to me from the start.

That “start” I’m referring to began six months after moving to Chicago, when three things occurred.  I was no longer able to attend Porsche events with my dad, and having a clear memory of the most recent Dana Point Concours and the very first Luftgekühlt event fresh in my mind, I realized that I took it all for granted. Secondly, I was commuting via public transit to and from campus daily, and I missed the freedom of the open road - something I never felt before.  Lastly, I began to think about the future, an excellent strategy when going through an intense period of my life, and I came to the realization that I wanted to restore a Porsche with my dad.  These thoughts culminated in a disproportionately silly plan - create a Porsche-centric instagram account that I can use to research the community and the cars, while having some fun as I attempt to develop a photographic perspective.  I very much underestimated the patience and goodness of others, and as time has continued on, I’d like to think that my intentions have evolved from something that may have initially been a predominantly self-serving mission to one resembling an ethos of gratitude and a desire to contribute.

With a childhood involved in the automotive realm, why choose the medical field?  

I had an unhealthy obsession with K’Nex growing up, which was supplemented with any LEGO I could get my hands on, including one of those awesome old space sets that my older brother had tucked away in our bedroom.  I think for a while I really wanted to be an architect, someone who created something, and this desire would surface at a few other points growing up and in some of my elective coursework decisions in college.  

Eventually though, I fell in love with Anatomy and Physiology in high school, which brought me enough joy at the time to register as a Biology major at UCSB.  Fast forward to some upper division courses in medical microbiology and parasitology and things were beginning to fall into place.  The most impactful part of my college experience was in the form of an unassuming seminar on underserved medicine that I attended weekly during the Winter quarter of my third year, as it would send me headlong into the world of Global Health and the structural violence and injustices that pervaded the world outside what I would learn was my privileged bubble.  This had me very seriously considering a more focused dive into public health, but I was still drawn to the role of a physician, one that I had seen in my grandfather’s work as a neurosurgeon in my hometown, and was fortunate to find a masters program in global medicine at USC that resonated with the idealism I was beginning to develop at the time. While earning my degree, I was hired on as a student worker to do a few graphic design jobs here and there thanks to an old copy of CS3 my brother gave me in college. Eventually my working role expanded, and by the time I graduated, the Keck School of Medicine of USC hired me on full-time to work for the global medicine program, in a broad role that included photo-documentation of our global health projects around the world. I’ll save those stories for another time, and will instead I’ll simply say I’m incredibly grateful to have worked there, and without them, I would not be the person that I am in the position that I am in today.  Those prior experiences forced me to shift my own paradigm, and had a large role in both my world view and as a medical student at the University of Illinois College of Medicine.  I hope that was a properly long-winded response to a simple question, which is to say my decision to pursue medicine was long, circuitous, exhausting at times, but the only way I would’ve wanted it to happen.

Did you ever consider ditching the medical route to pursue photography as a career?

I’ve never seriously questioned pursuing photography as a career, although on the particularly sleep-deprived days of medical school, I may have had a slightly different answer. Photography for me has served as an invaluable creative outlet, ever since I first decided to save my paychecks at Rip Curl on State Street in order to buy my first DSLR, a Nikon D3000 kit. I didn’t have any books to go off of, but instead would carry my camera with me everywhere on campus, capturing everything I could on manual mode, constantly tweaking each setting to see how it affected the image.  There were lots of trees, puddles, and Snowy Plovers on my early hard drives. Like I touched on before, my brother then gave me CS3, and I began to learn how to alter photos in a variety of ways after the shutter snapped shut.  My coursework at that time was often rote memorization, or just didn’t have much room for improvisation, and without really being cognizant of what I was doing I found myself filling that void. It wouldn’t be until right before I left for medical school, that my grandfather, a retired neurosurgeon by then, sat me down and explained the need for dedicated time to recreate yourself with the same level of effort and enthusiasm put forth into my training.

Do you have any advice on keeping a passion a hobby instead of jumping into it full-time?

I think the best advice I can possibly give is easy to say but hard to follow.  Do what makes you happy, and I don’t mean an “I just want to make tons of money” happy.  I mean the kind of happy you hopefully experienced as a child because you were shamelessly being you, nothing more, nothing less.  From my experience, it should come as no surprise that the people who were capable of doing that ended up either happy, or happy and paid.

Is there an importance for you personally to keep photography on the side?

The primary reason that I would not make photography my career, as fulfilling as that would be, is because I am grateful to have the opportunity to enter people’s lives at their most vulnerable and provide comfort and relief as a newly minted physician.  I also am keenly aware that as someone to have benefitted from a time-intensive and costly education, I have an obligation to society and my instructors to pay it forward and use what I’ve been given to reduce human suffering in whatever capacity I can.

A secondary reason is that I value my autonomy, especially as it relates to my role in the Porsche community.  There have been many opportunities to make a quick buck or attach myself to a meaningless corporate partnership, and with nearly 400k in student loans, it would have been an easy decision to make, but when you love something, you don’t exploit it or cede your control of it.  I’d like to think that the Porsche community sees me as a sincere contributor and someone who approaches it with humility bordering on reverence.  Even though my end goal isn’t to build a career out of it, why would I not approach it with the same intentionality as someone attempting to make a living out of it?  Time is a precious commodity and I don’t intend on wasting mine.  I find joy in the people and the process, and at the end of the day, everything else is gravy.

Has your involvement in the Porsche community impacted your time attending medical school?

I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine, now a neurosurgery resident in Houston, and I asked him for advice as he was finishing medical school when I started.  Two of his favorite things to do were play video games and compose music, and for a long time he abstained from these things in medical school, thinking he just didn’t have the time and that it made more sense for him to stay focused.  It wasn’t until he began to get burnt out that he started allocating time each day to do the things that brought him joy, and he immediately noticed an overall improvement in his mood and a noticeable bump in his exam scores.  

Once I adjusted to the pace of medical school, I made a very intentional dive headfirst into something that was entirely unrelated, and a few things happened. First, I met the community not as my dad’s son, but as an individual hungry to learn and participate, and was welcomed with open arms.  Although I loved my classmates, our conversations would often naturally veer back to medicine, and when that is already your entire existence, it was immediately refreshing to meet a bunch of people who share a common passion but come from a variety of fields and backgrounds.  Those friendships have led to so many great experiences across the country, and more than any cathartic photoshoot or editing binge, those real connections kept me sane and served as a comfort through the bleaker moments.  

Have you faced challenges balancing pre-med and your passion for photographing Porsches? 

This is the perfect opportunity to thank my wife, as I’m able to answer this question with little difficulty because of what she sacrificed during my time in medical school.  The significant others of medical students and doctors are the unsung heroes in this story.  They somehow manage to live their own lives, strive to accomplish their dreams, and still carry an increased burden to give us the time to do what we have to do to thrive.  Due to my amazing wife, I was able to focus on the things that made me a better student, and I factored my involvement in the Porsche community as one of those things.  I also found that the busier I became, with studies, volunteer work, and photography, I also compensated with increased efficiency.

To end things off, do you have a favorite or most memorable photoshoot?

I have two answers to this question, one personal and the other meaningful.  My answer to the meaningful shoot is any and all shoots that I did in Chicago, and before you say that’s a cop out, let me explain.  Chicago is where I found my own perspective, it’s where I worked up the courage to explore the Porsche community, and it’s where I overcame my own doubts in asking others in the community to take time out of their own day to explore an idea I had in the West Loop.  Every one of those shoots is meaningful to me, not only because each of those owners became a friend of mine, but because those locations all meant something to me.  Although I used a few more well known locations in the city, more often than not, to any passerby they may have appeared dismal or dumpy, or simply not the kind of place to shoot a beautiful vintage car.  That process of going for my constantly changing five or six-mile runs through the city served as a way to decompress, to explore the city, and eventually to tap into a creative side I didn’t know existed.

The shoots that were the most personally satisfying have been of Luftgekühlt 5 and 6.  I was graciously invited into the Luftgekühlt family and given the chance to shoot those two events on their behalf, and as someone who vividly remembers going with my dad to the first event at Deus Ex Machina, I will simply say it meant a lot to be involved in a tiny part of the magic.  Each of those events involved a day of staging, and this is where it became personal.  I brought my dad with me behind the scenes, and for the first time, as the sun set over the two of us and a collection of some of the rarest Porsches in existence, I felt that I was beginning to return the favor after all these years.  This magic continued into Luft 6, for although I’d missed the staging day due to a big exam in Chicago, I’d flown in overnight and we arrived at dawn only to have Jeff Zwart kindly guide the two of us into the coolest parking spot of the event.  I place no pressure on the future,  but I do know that my residency program gave me the week of Luft 7 off, so we’ll just have to wait and see where it takes us…