Each year, new students enroll at Southern Utah University and fill the campus with new talent and perspectives. One freshman who has contributed to the school in their first year is Kennedi Dutson, a music education and photography student here who has been creating art for as long as she can remember.
“I basically came out of the womb doing it,” she said.
Growing up, many of her family members were involved in the arts, so they always encouraged Dutson to express herself however she felt fit. Today, that manifests as playing the clarinet for SUU’s bands and owning her own photography business.
Throughout elementary school, she took voice and piano lessons on and off. Her dream was to become a big Broadway star. She also tagged along with her older brother on high school band trips. Outside of music, Dutson loved painting and crafting.
She also had a Youtube channel under the name “The Ken Ken Show,” where she would post videos of herself singing, crafting and performing skits. Throughout the years, she picked up many skills, so when photography came along, she didn’t think it would stand out from her other talents.
“Honestly, I don’t even know how I got my first camera,” she said. “I think I might have asked my parents for one, but it was so long ago that I have no idea.”
Dutson experimented with photography for the first time in August 2017, the summer before seventh grade. She had family visiting for the weekend and spontaneously took pictures of her younger cousins playing on her grandma’s front lawn.
After taking those pictures, she decided to create an Instagram page dedicated to her photography, posting the photos she had taken because, as she said, “I was posting everything back then.”
“I remember loving the unedited aesthetic of the pictures. I thought, ‘Ah, this is it. I’m so good!’” she mentioned. “Now, looking back… literally terrible! Everything about it is so bad.”
Seventh grade was also the year Dutson joined her middle school’s band. She had done choir the year before, still hung up on being a Broadway star. After taking that class for a year and not enjoying it, she followed her older brother’s footsteps and began playing the clarinet.
When she transitioned from middle school to high school band, her band director mentioned that they needed someone to play the baritone saxophone, so she switched her main instrument.
Dutson began taking private baritone saxophone lessons from a student at Snow College, who convinced his band director to let her join the college’s symphonic band while she was a freshman in high school.
“I had a lot of knowledge of things in music that a lot of people — where I grew up in Delta — didn’t really have,” she added.
While she progressed musically, Dutson also continued to develop her love for photography. She purchased a nicer camera and enjoyed taking pictures of friends and family in her free time.
In her junior year of high school, Dutson figured she could make a little money off her hobby and started doing paid shoots for her classmates.
While she was a senior, the band director that had coached her since middle school transferred to teach at another school. Losing a teacher who felt like family was hard on her. The school hired a new band director, but “the vibe just wasn’t the same.”
Dutson, who knew she wanted to get an education in music, realized that she wasn’t getting the experience she needed in her current band program. After speaking with members of Cedar High School’s music department, she decided to transfer there for the second semester of her senior year.
“Transferring kind of gave me the validation that I wasn’t a totally terrible player because I ended up being first clarinet there, beating a bunch of other people that were, in my opinion, extremely good players,” Dutson said.
Through a series of auditions, Dutson was accepted into SUU’s music department as a clarinet player, though the baritone saxophone was her main instrument for much of high school. She credits transferring schools for her confidence in the clarinet.
It was also at this time that Dutson realized she wanted to do more with photography. “I finally figured out the settings and everything that you need to know for photography and decided, ‘I’m gonna do this.’ A couple months later, I was like, ‘I’m actually good at this. I kinda want to do this as a career.’”
She spent a lot of time during the beginning of that summer, just after graduating high school, practicing photography, but in July, she took on a completely different challenge.
“Last minute, I decided I was going to do the Berklee Summer Music Program over in Boston at the Berklee College Campus of Music,” she said.
“It was crazy, honestly,” Dutson remembered. “Five weeks intensive of just music at Berklee, which is notably a jazz school, so it was really interesting to incorporate the clarinet into jazz where I’ve only done saxophone before.”
Dutson said she learned a lot from the classes and the incredible instructors there, but she learned much more about herself as a musician and a person through the friendships she had formed.
“It was really cool to see a bunch of musicians from all around the world, see why they were passionate about music and how they grew up doing it,” she remarked.
After returning from Boston, Dutson moved back to Cedar City to begin her first semester at SUU. She is a member of the athletic bands, meaning she plays at every football game and a majority of the basketball games. She is also in the wind symphony, symphonic band symphony, orchestra and woodwind ensembles.
“It’s definitely a lot different than high school. Everyone that is in [the music program] is passionate about it,” she said. “We are all here working hard to be better musicians.”
Dutson said that one thing she loves about music is “the family-like connection it makes between people.”
“I feel like in other departments and aspects of life you don’t have such an intimate connection with people right off the bat,” Dutson added.
Similarly to music, she loves the connections she has been able to make while capturing pictures. She prides herself on creating a comfortable and welcoming environment for her clients, because getting pictures taken is such an intimate experience.
Aside from that, she has also been able to make friendships with other photographers at SUU and even collaborate with them.
Dutson, loving both photography and music, has always strived to blend her two passions. Recently she began offering degree recital headshots and other music-related photoshoots to her classmates.
“I feel like there is no good way to balance it because they are such drastically different things, even though they are both in the artistic space,” she confessed.
During the week, she spends all day in classes and practice rooms, and on the weekends, she builds her photography portfolio, which takes more time than people would think.
“They think, ‘This much money for an hour shoot? That’s crazy! That’s absurd!’ But, logically, we’re driving to the location, taking the shoot, driving back and then we’re spending hours and hours editing,” said Dutson.
However, all the time spent on photography is worth it in her eyes. Dutson plans to use the next few years of college fostering her skills and growing her business before graduating and hopefully jumping into it full time.
The Instagram that she created in 2017 has acquired over 700 followers and is growing faster now than it ever has before. Through Dutson’s Instagram, she has been able to grow her clientele and her shoots have matured from just high school portraits to family pictures and even weddings.
Her dream in photography is to become a destination wedding photographer.
On the other hand, it has been her goal for years to become a secondary education music director. She knows that her future will include both music and photography; she just doesn’t know exactly what that will look like, whether that’s teaching for a few years before focusing on photography or taking photos full-time while offering private music lessons on the side.
“I feel like the motto ‘everything happens for a reason’ is so true,” she said. “You can focus so hard on one thing, and then because of that, something else will come up and roll off of it.”
Though the future is unpredictable, Dutson’s love for creation has led her to amazing places in both music and photography, and she plans to incorporate that same love into whatever she does.
Author: Heather Turner
Photos courtesy of Kennedi Dutson
Editor: Kale Nelson
eic@suunews.net
This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 edition of the University Journal.