I’ve been watching my life slowly pass before my eyes as I scan and edit these images.  Though I have tried to present the photographs chronologically on this website, I have digitized them in the random order of their storage.

I’ve noticed a few things while reviewing the images.

There is a first photograph I’ll have of someone, and a last.  Sometimes it’s the same image.  Some people who became important in my life snuck in from the margins, a friend of a friend whom I’d see occasionally and then frequently.  Others were people I wanted to photograph immediately upon meeting them.  Some first photographs are individual portraits.  Some are just general event photographs that have a picture of a friend in the background.  

I’ve frequently recognized when I’ve taken a first photograph.  I remember 48 years ago persuading a new camera-shy friend into letting me take pictures of her.  She became first first former wife.

I don’t know that I’ve ever recognized taking a last photograph.  My mother lying in bed in hospice care?  (I don’t think that she’d like it published so I haven’t.)  Some photos I look at and know - this is the last photo.  I shot it of him a few weeks before the diagnosis.  Or a few months before the accident.  Or the last time we bothered to reconnect.  

Fortunately this has not invaded my new photography.  I don’t wonder as I shoot - is this the last?  I don’t wonder as I breathe - is this the last?

The other thing I’ve noticed in the pastiche review of my life is how much better I am now at interpreting images.  I think it goes with my increased ability to understand the unspoken.

For example, look through the photographs of my first former wife.  Was there ever a time, or an image, where she shows her love for me?  Was it ever in fact there?

Or for another similar example, look at the photos of people who were interested in me but I could not recognize it, and the moment passed, and I took a different path.  

Those who know me know the chaotic path of my life.  The photographs don’t speak to that chaos - only sometimes through the abrupt appearance of that last photograph.  But the photographs do show paths I took and hint at the paths I missed.