the origin

My grandmother handed me a Canon AE-1 while cleaning out her house. Nobody was using it and a teenage grandson seemed like a reasonable destination. I thought it looked complicated and slightly inconvenient. The camera, to its credit, was more patient about this than I was.

My first photograph was her kitchen. Terribly lit, completely out of focus, but unmistakably a wooden chicken in the window above her stove. I’m not sure she still has it.

Over the years I developed an interest in philosophy, astronomy, and the general question of why any of this exists. Photography arrived somewhere in the middle of all that. Fortunately I already owned a camera. One thing, as they say, led to another.

Now, Photography is the one I return to when my world has gotten too big. One eye closed, one eye open. Suddenly there is only now. The silence of the present. Eckhart Tolle would approve. Probably.