Seasons of Life, Photography and a New Destination

I have a philosophy about the seasons of adult life.  Once you are “grown up” and out there on your own, your life is devoted to three things.  Pay it back, Pay it forward and then Take Care of Yourself. 

The first part, to pay it back, is to acknowledge that in some way, you have likely been standing on the shoulders of giants to have reached the point where you are in life.  That debt should be acknowledged, gratitude shown, and reconciled as a rite of passage.  In my life, that has been about creating a career that gave my single mother something to be proud of as she headed into retirement.  Then in the years that followed, the financial ability to step away from that career and care for her as her memory faded into the mist of vascular dementia.

To Pay it forward is to recognize that as others have helped you to the spot you have found, others behind you will need a guide into their own future.  For most, this involves the bearing and raising of children.  For me, this has meant starting a new career as a university lecturer.   In this role not only do I teach statistics and economics, but I also advise students through their academic careers.  I am often helping small groups of students with their research goals or they are helping me with mine.

Then it is time to Take Care of Yourself.  This is to acknowledge that we have personal needs of purpose that are separate from the purpose of responsibility.  What would we do if the constraints of life disappeared, time melted away, and we spent our time doing something that nurtured our soul.  Who would we invite into this space with us?  This may not come as a surprise to you since you are reading this, but for me one of those things is photography.  As for the people whom I hope to share time with, my wife Jenny is my constant and beloved travel companion through life’s journey.  We are compliments for each other, forming joyfulness along the way.  In the picture as well, are the people who serve as models, muses and inspiration for conceptual images I have hope for creating.

For most people, these are not distinct phases, they blend together.  A little of each happens in every discernable measure of time, but the mix changes as we progress through life.  For me there seems to be a strong sequential weighting of these phases.  I am in the middle of a period of paying it forward with a clear sense of what it means to take care of myself.  Everyone’s progression is likely different, but it is probably a healthy exercise to ponder how we have contributed to each of these calls over a reasonable period in which to muse.

I write this now for a couple reasons.  First, I have never written these things down.  I don’t keep a regular journal and this is the closest thing I have.  Second, I have noticed a yearly cycle to my photographic activities and they flow in a similar blended mixture only to begin again every spring.  They are annual, whereas life is one long journey.

For each photographer, there is a time to capture, process, organize and communicate our work.  For me, I find there is a bit of a cycle to it. 

In spring the weather breaks, the blooms call and it becomes easy to head out to make pictures.  After a while, we start accumulating memory cards full of raw files or rolls of film and both need developing and/or processing to produce final images.  Then when we have accumulated enough images, there is the need to organize them.  Individual sessions need curated and sequenced to summarize the moments or vision of a shoot.  Retrospective collections have new images added with an assessment of their relative maturity.  Finally, there is a time to communicate with others what we have done with our time.  In those moments, we spend time printing, writing and showing our work to others.

These activities often blend on top of each other, a great day of shooting is sure to lead to an evening of processing and posting to that place where we share what we are working on with those who take interest in our work.  I don’t tend to get it all done immediately, processing can lag, perhaps only the easiest of edits are tended to.  Images stack up. 

As fall settles into winter I get to those unprocessed images.  I wonder if I get to enough of them?  Are there ones I forgot?  Putting together a “Year of Images” gallery forces me to begin the organization process.  It serves a similar purpose as to those who pursue “365” projects to keep a camera in hand and constantly making images on the front end of the cycle. 

If the weather has not taken a turn for the cold, December brings with it winter break from school, and a chance to make more images.  But then winter comes.  Don’t even think about bugging me in early January… I might be a little distracted.  Man, I took a lot of pictures this year.

Once the yearly images are curated and additions are made to ongoing projects, the time to communicate the work I have done begins.  What changes need to be made on the website?  What projects should be closed with a final curation?  Should I print it, find a place to show it?  Is this the project with which I make my first monograph?  I need to write on that blog I forgot I started on the website and tell people what I’ve done with my time.  I wonder if I still have any subscribers?

Truth is that we should be spending some time with all of these over any meaningful measure of time.  Winter is full of wonderful photographs to make.  If we organized our work in some little way while it is unprocessed, maybe we wouldn’t forget what we were thinking or feeling months later.  We should be sharing things all through the year so our supporters and enthusiasts remember that we still exist, not just during those times when the space heater at our feet keeps us warm while we type.

The story of Vivian Meyer is becoming well known these days.  She was always taking pictures.  For her photographic career, it was always spring.  While spring is a magical time, the pity of her life is that she never made it to the point where she stamped her vision on her images and the stories they told.  She never knew the respect and adoration her images would garner in the eyes of others.

For me, Its February, winter storm Landon has left 10 inches of snow on the ground.  The space heater is warming my toes from the walk out to Briley’s bath tub in the back hay pasture, the place where Escape and the Hope Project were both made.  I processed the image I wanted, it’s posted on my social links and oh hey…I have a journal page on my site.  I apologize for being away for so long.

I will continue updates here as my image making progresses.  I am happy to mention that some of my ramblings will be found in a new place.  I found a natural home for my film images and thoughts on the analogue craft.  35mmc.com is a nice community of people who love film.  Future content that would have found its way onto the “Back to Film” page will be posted there.  Similarly, on occasion I will use that venue to post about longer, project related work that I hope is seen by a larger audience.  I will be sure to drop a note about those posts here.  I will primarily use this space to talk about my current digital creations.

In the meantime, it dawns on me that there is another step in the photographic cycle.  That step is to plan.  Plan so we don’t simply stagger into the new annual cycle, blowing wherever the wind takes us.  In this instance I don’t mean to plan as in detailed schedules, but have a vision of where we want to go with our work.  Planning that ties the fruits and seeds of this year into the blooms of next.  That is on my mind these cold winter days as well.  Time to pour a glass of port and let those thoughts flow.