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You know the story. You grow up, get a job, make a bit of money, this affords you a nicer camera than the one you’ve been tooling around with and, in turn, opens up some tear in the fabric of your life. From this point forward, life stops moving in a linear direction, and just as you begin to understand the gravitational draw of nostalgia, the withering of the body along with the enlightening of the soul, the beauty of the quotidian, the true sound of birds in the morning, the true feeling of trees, the truth of coffee and love and good shoes and the garden of life — you delve deeper and deeper in the art of the moment. It was perhaps unforeseen, this love affair with photography, yet it somehow seems preordained. You dive through and you realize you are not writing this novel, it is writing you. You can find religion in that letting go.
My father’s life line on his palm splinters at some point, a symbol of his own two lives. My path didn’t deviate too far from his, we had the same amount of kids, four, at the same ages. And at some point, he gave up on the grind, for his art, too. Maybe at the same moment. I’ll ask him when I see him. We gather weekly these days. My father is the great listener, the poet, the original troubled soul. And fathers are a sort of womb, too. We learn attachment from our mothers, we learn about personhood from our fathers — and that, as it turns out, is…
