Between the Old and the New

In the morning, while still in bed, I check my email and surf looking over photography and social network websites.

The past month I had been shooting with images of fashion spreads in American magazines in my mind's eye. The models are serious even when they're playing. The backgrounds are simple, usually white or gray. Few designers employ the exuberant, über romantic style I associate with European photographers.

I'm a student of Thoreau who wrote, "I require of every writer a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives.... for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me." I embarked in photography because I wanted to live as an artist, someone who viewed who looked for beauty on the canvas of his daily experience. After living till now analyzing and reasoning I wanted to shift what I valued and therefore paid attention to what appealed to the aesthetic sense.

My ideas are generations old. They are not bad. Many are reassuring, some even wise. But I am drawn especially in images or what the eyes consume to what is new, what people younger than me are constructing as their images of beauty. These are new ways of seeing things. This is why I wanted to try this new way of looking.

There are many photographers out there, many of them amateurs like me in the sense of not having earned money from their work, whose photographs just knock the socks off one. It's the colors they put in their images, the surprising juxtapositions, the humor and derring-do, almost disrespect for canons with which I grew up. This is exciting. Possibilities equal hopefulness. There are more things in life to know, Horatio.

In the brouhaha I want to improve my own sense of beauty and ultimately my love of life but I don't want to lose myself either or disrespect what I am. The new always excites but is not always better. Still I am learning to see in ways that feel new to me. Perhaps this is the fabled fountain of youth. As long as we see possibilities we can make part of ourselves we are not dead but alive in concert with everything else that changes and has consciousness it is changing. Maybe beauty is just another word for being alive.