History or Story?

These are my credentials: time, perspective, arts, reading, passionate vision, extensive experience with light and weather. People like to tell me things on the most casual of meeting. It’s a privilege to hear people’s stories that piece together history more important than dates and verifiable facts.

In fact, storytelling is everything, perhaps the only thing that is a shaper of understanding and attitudes of life. In these years of closures, we note how histories around the world have been rewritten, obscured, denied, falsified. While I write, fiction or not, while I reexamine my images, current or from my archive, I find I cannot get away from experiences. All of these crowd into the words that fashion themselves on my pages. Stories, mine and others, have become for me be the most accurate account of life and journey.

Child persuading the photojournalist to have his picture made

Karl’s serious critique made me realize that the text of Fragments of Spirit flows from my own story, first and foremost. When an academic historian expressed the value of experiential memoir as opposed to attempting to speak for a place, or a people, or event—I finally understood my job. The entire book was rewritten over many months, and the photographs reorganized into cogent chapters. Interspersed memoir and images solidified the photographic story into a real tale.

The result? Being present, both then and now in this curious melding of experiential history. There is the present when images were made and acquaintances met—plus readers tell me they I have somehow created for them a revival sensation of being present.