Life, Values & Legacy: Our Chat with Nacho Thorne of Phoenix

We recently had the chance to connect with Nacho Thorne and have shared our conversation below.

Nacho, we’re thrilled to have you with us today. Before we jump into your intro and the heart of the interview, let’s start with a bit of an ice breaker: What battle are you avoiding?
A battle that I am avoiding is worrying about what other people think about me and trying to win their approval because when you try to please everyone it leaves you stressed out and wastes your time and energy, so trying to win the approval of others has no benefits to it. Instead I live for Jesus Christ and His approval because at the end of the day His approval is what matters and when you live for Jesus you will see how much He loves you, that He will never leave you, and His love for you will never change and through that you will be able to experience His love and His peace which will transform your life for the greater.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Yeah, so first off my name is Ignacio but a lot of people call me Nacho and the work that I do is photography with my niche being basketball photography. How photography all started for me was back in 2022 when I was a senior in high school, photography and cameras had always interested me and that same year I also took a film class which helped me gain more interest in it. I remember one day I bought a camera and just started using it so that I could get use to using a camera. Ever since then I’ve stuck with it and have seen so many opportunities open up and I have seen a lot of progress being made over the last three years which has been amazing to see. The whole journey has been super fun and I am very thankful for it all and everyone that I have met along the way. I am also very thankful for all the support that has been shown to me over the past three year which has been encouraging for me, so I want to say thank you to everyone that has been showing support throughout the whole process.

With my sports photography what has helped me make it unique is that I always try have my own style that catches people attention when they see my work on social media and ways that I try doing that is a lot of different camera angles and photo editing. I focus on these two things because certain angles add uniqueness to the photo and with photo editing a lot of times I experiment to see what textures, colors, brightness, and other different aspects of photo editing add creativity to the pictures because photo editing adds so much more to the original photo, so I have noticed for myself that angles and photo editing have helped me find my own style to have my work be interesting and unique..

Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. What breaks the bonds between people—and what restores them?
What I think breaks the bonds between people is dishonesty because when someone is dishonest to someone else or both people are being dishonest to each other you lose that trust with one another because you don’t really know if what you guys are saying to each other is true or not, so I think dishonesty is what breaks bonds between people. What I think restores them though is humilty and love. I think these are what help restore those bonds with people because when you are humble you are able to have an open mind, you are able to admit mistakes you’ve made, and you also don’t hold the other person’s mistakes against them. Love also ties in with humility because when you love someone you want to do whatever you can to make things right with them, allowing yourself to be humble and to restore any bonds that were broken before.

If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
If I could say one kind thing to my younger self it would be that you have the ability to be successful and the ability to do great things in life.

Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What’s a belief you used to hold tightly but now think was naive or wrong?
A belief that I used to hold tightly in the past was that people that don’t believe that you can go far and be successful in your craft that you had to prove them wrong, but overtime as I have been working more on my photography I have realized that if I do it to just prove people wrong than I am doing it for the wrong reason because I would just be doing photography for a petty reason rather than doing it because I enjoy working on the craft. I have changed that mindset of trying to prove people wrong and I’ve put my focus on getting better with my photography because I enjoy doing it, having fun with it, being thankful for everyone that has been supporting me along the way, and being thankful for all of the opportunities that I have had during my process. As I have changed my old mindset I have been having a lot more fun with working on my photography and have been more appreciative of the journey.

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. Are you tap dancing to work? Have you been that level of excited at any point in your career? If so, please tell us about those days. 
Yeah, so first I want to give a big shout out to NabiNation. For those who don’t know NabiNation they are a Native American basketball league that provide opportunities for young Native American basketball players to play in a big basketball tournament to show off their skills. I mention NabiNation because in late July of this year they gave me an opportunity to do media for their league and I was able to get a great experience of doing basketball photography. It was a four day tournament but during those four days I was very excited to go to every basketball game that I went to throughout the tournament and during each game I had a lot of fun being on the sidelines taking pictures, so that was a time where I was super excited to show up and take pictures.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Top.Nach.Photography

Image Credits
Nacho Thorne