Originally Posted Sunday, August 3, 2014

I received an email a few days ago that was unexpected.  It was from an old girlfriend who I haven't seen for a number of years now, one of the old true loves who went to NYC and made it big in the fashion magazine biz.  She is the fashion editor now for one of the big glossies though her email said she was leaving that job as she had been there six years and it was time to move on and up.  Of course no one writes an old friend they haven't seen when they've been fired and demoted and life is shit, so this was one of those stirling reports of how wonderful things can truly be. 

"And how are you?" 

Well. . . she reads the blog, the old one, I think.  She has never told me if she comes here or not, but I'll take my chances.  In the course of the email, she told me she was ready for a change in my photography.  A new direction, I guess.  Move on. 

The unsolicited opining stung me pretty hard and quick.  I've posted one of the old pictures here today. Hasn't my photography changed?  But I must assume she meant the theme and not the method. 

I thought about that all week and almost wrote back that I felt the same about the images in the magazine she works for.  Same thing over and over and over.  Fuck me, it's like telling Paolo Roversi he needs to do something else.  I'm no Paolo Roversi, but the analogy might hold. . . maybe.  I began thinking about photographs, not all of them in the world taken together, but individual photographers who have become well known.  They had a brand.  They didn't change it radically.  Who the fuck cares about Sally Mann's photographs after she quit shooting her children?  Bad wet plates of dead faces?  Southern landscapes?  Blah.  But she made the change, that's for sure. 

She included a photograph of herself in the email, the sort we all envy, black and white, she looking like we all want to look, beautiful and confident.  I couldn't help myself--I sent one back of me in the bathroom mirror with the beautiful overhead lighting accentuating the scarred wrinkles of my face, me looking like someone on the Keith Richards plan. 

Of course, I haven't heard back.  Perhaps I wasn't the way she remembered.  Ho!

I have spent the days since the email evaluating my life and the lives of people I know.  In light of her success, I feel unaccomplished, I guess, and the people I know look to be much the same.  Small victories here and there, making a life in the suburbs working in banks and businesses and law offices but mostly not taking the chances of living out an adventurous or glamorous or outrageously successful life.  Quiet neighborhoods and hissing lawns as symbols of success.  For many and the best, though, there are eschewed dreams and squandered opportunities. 

The girl in NYC didn't squander any at all.  She pursued the life she wanted with vigor and man, it all worked out. 

Oh. . . I told her about the shutters.  I wanted her to know how exciting life can be.