The premise In a year long class called “A Year to Live” centered on preparing ourselves for our own passing. We imagined that our life would end in one year, and we went through steps leading up to that point, culminating in our “deaths” a year after the class began.
In dying we would be leaving everything behind, so we were instructed to find something personal, something unique, of value, to give to another member of the class, recognizing that in giving it away we would be symbolically preparing for that time when we would be giving everything away. I gave away a clock that I had bought at Gumps in San Francisco and had given to Uncle Rowland. When he died his survivors went through the house, selecting mementos for themselves. I gave Rowland the clock. I took it back. I gave it away to someone in my Year to Live class.
So my focus isn’t on what we’ll take with us (nothing), but what we leave behind. There are the intangibles, of course, how our lives affected those that remain.
Yesterday I was talking to nine year old Isla. “The three biggest musical stars of the last century were The Beatles. Have you heard of them?” “Yes,” she answered. “Elvis Presley?” No. “Frank Sinatra?” No.
Kim, only one generation away, said that when Jadyne and I pass, the first thing she’d sell would be the photograph I bought at an Art Gallery depicting The Beatles in Indianapolis on their first North American tour, an heirloom…for me. The rich and famous pass away, not just in the minds and memories of those who loved them, but soon everywhere but in the pages of history books. For the Beatles their songs will remain. Elvis and Frank’s, too. But at some point the songs, too, may become uninteresting, irrelevant, dated, mere curiosities.
If, as George Harrison wrote, “all things must pass”, we accept that our lives, our memories, all that we experienced, loved, worked for, cared for, blessed, cursed, accepted, dismissed, are as temporary and as transitive as we are, then thinking about a legacy is a Sisyphian task. Except when the rock rolls down we won’t be there to stop it.
I bought a new photographic printer this year, an Epson P5000 Surecolor. I’ve also downloaded some software programs that can take photos I’ve saved, many from as long as fifty years ago, and improve them. I am printing some of my favorites. They represent the one legacy that I have control over. They’re flammable, disposable, possibly recyclable. My offspring can do with them as they please.
Much of what I hold dear, much of what I believe, defines what represents me, is captured in my photographs.
My friend Darrell refers to photographs as “captures”, an appropriate term. What is “captured” isn’t just a moment in time, but in the best cases, recognizable worlds that reveal and define universal emotions and experiences.
Jennifer presenting her husband Andrew with his firstborn child. He sees Susanto for the first time. Jadyne shares in the joy.
Some images capture a time and a place. Free love no-holds-barred, hedonistic physical, religious, and spiritual movements coalesced in San Francisco in “The Summer of Love”, 1967. Busloads of tourists traveled down Haight Street to see the blissed out “hippies” with their long hair, sandals, dancing in the street, painting sidewalks, marching in Hare Krishna parades, and smoking ever-present joints.
The cymbals, the flower, the expression, the hair…this represents everything I remember about the time. I lost the negative, but I had made a print that I rephotographed. This is it.
America. There are countless images of America with its “purple mountain majesties”, and “its amber waves of grain.” Hidden among them are its “spacious skies”, such as this one along the “loneliest road in America”, Hwy 50 in Nevada. and the foreboding desolation beneath those skies.
Below are images that either have meant a lot to me or represent an area in photography that I’ve loved.
The “Old Man”, 1969, perhaps the first image I ever took that I really liked…the rooftops of Paris, $50 Best in Show in the first photography contest I ever entered…Denise, the ballerina who graced a magazine cover and with it a free trip to Hawaii…the funeral of Patrick O’Day, the first soldier killed in the Gulf War…a girl who posed in Delhi with eyes that looked right through me…the Sonoma County Hells Angels in 1976…my three kids…a beach in San Sebstastian, Spain in 1972…a New York street photography image…an old woman in India…49ers Cheerleader…a Supermoon 2021…Women’s March marcher, a coathanger tattooed on her chest…a friend I’ve known for more than fifty years…children being children and older children having trouble accepting them…a vendor on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue…an unusual Cuban dance troupe…animals of all kinds and stripes…flowers, thousands of flowers, …San Francisco sunset with thunderstorm…the homeless…things that amuse me…black and white portraits—photographer, optometrist, musician, architect, and birds…ya gotta love birds. I sold this as a poster.
So what have I “captured?” What do these images mean? Or do they mean anything? They are part of me, the way I look at the world, they are the people who accompany me on my ride, they reveal the joy that I feel in simply being a sentient being, one that expresses what I see and what I feel when I stand behind a lens.