Pictures from my window and the practice of making stuff with other people
Thoughts about legacy and craft
The best explanation of good writing and communicating I’ve ever heard is mastering the organization of your thoughts. Throughout any given week, I have several ideas for this newsletter similar to thoughts of all the delicious meals I want. I have ideas about photography projects, dilemmas in parenting, my disdain for Seattle winters, or career pivots. Lately, I’ve been thinking more about place and growth, and a lot about death and the imprint I’ll have on this earth. The problem is organizing it all in some clear and interesting way. I think this is where photography comes in for me because it helps me freeze ideas or concepts or whatever sort of perception I want to remember. Although there’s a dissonance between what’s real, what I feel, and what I will keep feeling, photography helps me center my thoughts around an image that does. and will, exist.
The word “legacy” has the type of grandeur that feels reserved for the extraordinary, but in reality, we’re all privileged to leave a legacy around us. As our lives get busier, more complicated, and potentially more mundane, the idea of legacy – our contribution to another generation – can be a grounding concept when we think about how we live our lives and how our actions will create any sort of ripple around us. I’ve thought about direct legacy with my children: how they should interact with the world, how they should coexist with other humans, and what should matter. They may choose to extract whole parts of the legacy or disregard it completely, or mix things they’ve learned and build their own interpretations. The latter is the hope, the goal. It has to be.
I choose certain instruments to think about how I tackle legacy for children. Already, my middle child thinks about creativity, and artistic expression, and has caught on to my fascination with photography. Almost every weekend, he asks if we can take photo walks since he’s accompanied me on a few early morning excursions or seen me pack extravagantly large bags on trips with only photo gear. The irony is that photo walks aren’t a legacy I thought I’d ever want to encourage. I’m not a communal photographer in any sense of the idea. I hate sharing ideas. I hate sharing technique. I hate sharing behind the scenes approaches to the way I interact with the world. It’s why I find most of the photographer community on social media nauseating.
Look at my roll of film. Look at my camera. Look at how I stalked my prey in the street. Look at how I didn’t even take a picture.
I’m fairly judgemental about communal artistry because I have a fundamental belief that isolation leads to the best type of output or artifact. I also make for me because the conflict of making is so personal, so fueled by emotion and personal experience that thinking about others participating in it is like having someone see me pick my clothes in the morning. I know that’s a thing, but it’s not my thing.
I like discovering the world on my own, limiting someone else’s contamination to critique versus influencing me to capture something. I don’t want to see what others photograph versus what I photograph, or how others might see the world captured differently. But spending time photographing with my kid has been such a new experience for me because it feels like I’m seeing growth right in front of me, which is its own kind of spectacular viewing. It’s also teaching me to be more open to discussion during a creative process, something I don’t often do.
One of my favorite activities is making sure to snap shots while parked at a red light. The act is both by necessity but it also fills a very specific cup for me: making something while alone. Most of my current days are spent in a home office, slogging away at my desk until I have to pick a kid up from school or daycare. Because I live in a city surrounded by water and completely unorganized streets, I spend as much time in my car going three miles as I would going from the north side of the valley to the north side of Hollywood. This means the opening of my driver-side and passenger-side windows become portals to interactions I may not encounter walking along a lake or in a neighborhood. I simply don’t have the time. Yet, if I think of my gas guzzler as a studio lot tour of my city, the locations I run into turn into dramatic scenes. It’s completely voyeuristic and distant but keeps me focused on observation and what the world is doing while I’m trying to get from my house to a grocery store. The world doesn’t stop being interesting just because I’m in a car. But since I’ve had these moments, I am starting to think more openly about photographing with others. If I can fill both cups of creativity, maybe there’s a way of creating I haven’t encountered yet.
What does this have to do with legacy? Maybe I’m becoming more fixated on the things I’ll leave my children. And one of those things will be centered on how we create and why we create, and that maybe collaboration is a portal I need to think about creating, the way windows in my car let fresh air in and fresh perspectives. I spent so much of my youth battling what seemed like an insurmountable amount of imposter syndrome, usually self-inflicted (unless it always is), and didn’t have the tools to help me see that a little confidence, grit, and cutting out of noise is all I needed. I mostly have that now and it is expressed through small projects like “Let’s take photos out of my car window and see what I see.”
The legacy is that I want my kids to make, regardless of their situation. If they have an idea or story, do what you need to do to express it. Take a walk with someone. Roll down the window and have a camera ready. Write about it even if you think it isn’t really interesting at all.
I’m writing this on what would have been my dad’s 79th birthday. There’s a lot of grief in my home since the passing of my father-in-law a few weeks ago. I’ve been thinking a lot about how these two men were very gregarious, positive, incredibly loving, and warm souls. They always had smiles on their faces and never let ailing bodies detour the overwhelming positive outlooks they had for themselves and for others. I think that’s part of my thoughts on legacy as well: how will my kids remember my demeanor? Will “fun” “joyful” and “positive” come into the conversation? I hope so. Happy birthday pops.
Some things I’ve been reading.
Encountered a kindred spirit in this newsletter called Archival Recordings. Beautiful visuals of Los Angeles and a new project on the valley, where I’m originally from.
Did I already link to this article about subcultures dying?
Our collective loneliness plunged our happiness score.
For some tunes this week, an oldie but goodie. Happy Sunday.
Happy posthumous bday to your pops. Did he leave much behind in terms of photos? Old school camcorder videos of family vacations? Sometimes I think about the amount of data that is going to be handed down with each passing generation and how the future will try to make sense of it all. Did you read Paul Ford’s My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes? [https://www.wired.com/story/my-fathers-death-in-7-gigabytes-internet-archive/]
Isn’t it a trip to think that your kids, when feeling nostalgic in the future, will be able to say something like “hey Siri, show me 10 photos from this drive in the style of my dad’s photography”?