Bill,
I think of all the cameras and lenses that I've sold, traded and given away and one event stands out from that background.
My father gave me two Pentax Spotmatics and three lenses when he saw that I was serious about the work and later, in a phase of my life that can only be described as extended callow ignorance, I sold them back to him. I had hit a wall and rather than confront that wall, I deviated, much like running from a heartbreak straight into the arms of another.
He, of course, barely twenty years older than I, recognized this and simply waited for me to pull my head out and re-engage. A year later I bought them back and started chipping away at that wall. That interlude still makes me cringe more than a half-century later. Many years later I sold them and now that my father has passed and I am confronting my own mortality, there is a peculiar nostalgia for those cameras and lenses.
Writing and photography were our lingua franca. He made some impactful images and wrote some important books. We both recognized that it was the work and not exactly the tools that were important, but after the images and the words, that kit we both used has a powerful totemic presence in my imagination. They are apart from the relationship between me and my father, yet they help me remember some of the aspects of our relationship that would maybe be submerged beneath the long continuum that is our idea of the past.
I often wonder about our perception of the world and I am reminded that the map is not the terrain. Words and phrases are not the subtext. The memory of that kit triggers other memories - ideas - that are far more important.
Best,
Shane
