A New Day
What has come before
shall come again;
Only when we look shall we see;
Only when we study
shall we learn;
Only when we observe
shall we understand;
Only when we submit shall we be fortified.
Through photography I have begun to slow down, look and observe. What I have always taken for granted now I view with much curiosity and interest. Photography is changing my life and my path.
For those closest to my heart know of the deepest desire to set my life course in search of personal reconciliation. Others: all of who care, may I be forgiven for my human err and frailty.
As an only child, male, white, and a towhead, does nothing to prepare one’s life with regards to cultural or racial diversity. As any child will tell you, their lives are seldom their own, at least from my generation. And as life would have it, I did indeed end up living as a minority amongst communities heavily populated by brown skin and other races, for one reason or another.
Born to a tenant-farmer mother from Indian Town Community, SC, and a father from a small family-farm harvesting the tobacco crop out of Johnsonville, SC, in the early sixties began to pave my way into a world of diversity. Surrounded by color from birth, and hence living within racially diverse communities provided cultural and interracial exposure and awareness and personal equality. But never truly seeing nor appreciating this dichotomy of culture and people until that early morning in the month of May in the year 2009.
Sticking out like a sore thumb in the local outdoor seafood market on the interior boundary of Potomac River in Washington DC, camera mounted atop a tripod amongst such diversity, I discovered the reason for my life.
Focusing on my photo assignment at the time, which was nothing more than working on capturing a correct exposure, learning to see the way a camera sees and pushing the shutter. Little did I know that instance was the life changing moment for me, how could I ? It was not until later that night when I went back to review my day’s work and only then truly fell in love with life and the process of documenting it. It was at that moment I knew what was missing in my life.
Others will tell you they were born with a camera in their hand, not me. I always enjoyed looking at photos, very much, I am very visual. But I never put two and two together. I guess I always believed a person’s calling was a natural talent graced from God, a vocation. I believed photography was only for the gifted and talented, that if one did not naturally take to it or possess a clairvoyant path, then it must not be. I was wrong.
I may never be a great photographer held up by the critics or acknowledged by my peers, but do not let that dissuade me or for that matter, you. For one’s calling is being true to oneself. There is nothing more that I want to do than to become a photographer. I love what the camera can do, for me, for the subject, for life and for the world.
George Mason:
That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
Thomas Jefferson: And later restated in the Declaration of Independence by;
“We hold this truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among this are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed;”
Through the words of George Mason and President Jefferson, my happiness, and the pursuit thereof is viewing the world through the end of a lens, documenting and recording life.