I was probably fourteen years old the first moment I picked up a camera with purpose, with intention. I remember the Canon AE-1 and the way it smelled, the sound of the film advance lever when you pulled it to ready it to make another photograph, the little light meter that bounced and danced inside the viewfinder when you tried your damndest to get the manual settings of aperture and shutter speed just right for the film you were using. I remember the mechanical click when you finally pushed the shutter button.
I remember Doug, the guy who owned his own photography darkroom here in Helena, MT when I was just a teenager, and I remember his kindness when he offered to teach me how to do it, when all I called for was to see if he’d develop a few rolls of film for me. I remember going around town with him and him letting me use his large format old-fashioned camera, those strange beauties that sit on tripods and come with a hood to look inside. I remember the smell of the chemicals and him teaching me that the red light you see in darkrooms in movies only work for black and white photographs, they ruin everything else.
I remember falling in love with photography the moment I first saw an image I made come to life in that bath of chemicals. I remember the clothespins that hung my first image up on the line to dry, a photograph of my dog Clancy on the back deck of the home I’d spent the last decade growing up in. Something I couldn’t possibly bear the thought of losing.
We photograph what we love the most.
In 30 years of making images, I see this in the thousands and thousands of pictures I’ve taken of Sarah, from the first on November 12, 2009, to the ones I took last night on our routine walk after dinner with Gilly. I see it in the way she’s aged, the silver that spread like slow moonlight over the wavy surface of her hair, in the laugh lines that are emerging from almost two decades of directly laughing at some stupid nonsense I’m engaged in.
I see it in her ease with herself, the version of her she’d been waiting to grow into but life and fear and self-consciousness held her back from. I see it in the beauty that comes with a settled heart, the peace of being accepted as you are, as you wish to be. The images tell the story of her growth into this woman, this world-wandering whirlwind of a woman who holds more in her heart than I ever knew could fit. She of mountaintop or jagged-ragged coastline, of ice cream held up to mouth like trophy, of arm around those she loves, of smile that beams bright enough to over-expose the images I try to make. Slow growth, slow settling into a hum of heart-sound and gentle song.
There was the man I captured mid-prayer in some cathedral we wandered into. Stained glass light behind him, leaned over with what felt like grief, hands clasped together and eyes-closed. He looked up at the cross on the far side of the apse for a moment or two like he was looking for answers to questions I knew I’d never know, but somehow, understood. There are the workers cleaning windows or painting signs in small coastal villages in Scotland and Ireland, living lives I’ll never live, knowing things I’ll never know. The mid-prayer man, the woman smoking the cigarette outside the pub, hell, the horse on the windswept western edge of a tiny green island in a huge sea of blue, all these looking beyond me to something I cannot see. All these, carried home time and again in a little square of shine, still alive, still asking those secret questions.
Thirty years chasing the light, naming a company for it, building a life around this seeking. Thirty years looking for it, watching it shift and morph and pass slowly over green hillsides and grey mountains, over the faces of those I cherish, over strangers after seventeen years of doing this professionally. Thirty years of light chasing only to come home, to sit down to write poetry or essays, haiku or letters, and without fail it’s the shadows I always reach for first. The heart of the seeking, the opposites that live quietly next to each other, but it’s shadow that pulls me in, the dark I long for in image, in words, in life. The softness of a stormy morning instead of blinding sunshine that overwhelms my autism, the rumble of thunder and the blanket of grey clouds that roll in from the west. The parts of me that feel like the minutes after twilight, not sunrise.
These contradictions, in art, in life, in me.
These that live in the in-between moments, not the posed moments at weddings we work or at family gatherings where all say cheese at the same time. Not those that feel planned or thought out, not those of attempt and curation, but those when someone thinks the camera has turned away, that the finger has been lifted from the shutter release. The accidental frames, the blurred edges with light leaks. These I save more than all others.
I am still learning to see. After thirty years with a camera around my neck, I think that’s the whole point.
Scattered across this office, this house, the great big cloud that exists somewhere my mind still wants to say is Up, there is a photograph of a dog on a back deck, probably overexposed, probably slightly out of focus, taken by a fourteen year old boy who didn’t have any idea what he was doing. Who didn’t know he was learning not to make images, but to pay attention. Who didn’t know that was the same thing as learning to truly love.
Somewhere are ten thousand thousand photographs of Sarah in every single state of grace between first meeting and last night’s walk with soft sprinkling from an early Summer storm.
Photographs of something I couldn’t bear to lose, so I pointed the lens at it, pushed the button, and saved.
I love you all.
Be good.
