The Big Question....

...Final coda to my previous two retrospective posts, looking backwards at my life over the past 35 years and the things I did wrong and did right. The biggest question probably is, how do I feel really about not having primarily pursued art photography as a career? Because, being a teacher and writer and editor and critic and blogger, actual photographic work took a back seat. Was that the right choice?

I do admit to having some regret. But it's hardly the whole story.

As I was mulling over what to say about this, what came over the virtual transom but this lovely comment from my old friend Steve. Steve put it into words so much better than I could have that there's little I can add.

Steve Rosenblum: "I think that what I did right in my life and my photography have been based upon something that I only realized looking back at it. I won't bore everyone with the details, but last July I retired from a 40-year career in medicine, most of which was spent as a cardiologist, a career I never intended for myself, performing procedures that had not been invented when I started. Both in my career and in my life there was no way to have predicted the opportunities and paths that appeared along the way which offered me choices I could not have imagined. A good general example is that when I was at University from 1970–74 there was no such thing as a desktop PC, or a 'mini' (think the size of a filing cabinet) computer. There was no internet, world wide web, or email besides primitive messaging for people with rare access to mainframe computers, which is the only kind of computer that existed. There were no cell phones or smart phones, much less wrist-watch computers (something we only saw in Dick Tracy cartoons). My first encounter with a flat screen TV was in a short story written by Ray Bradbury called 'The Veldt' that he wrote in the early '50s and I read at age 12 in 1964. No digital cameras of course.

"Nonetheless, I took a year of computer programming in 1971 because the problem solving of using Fortran interested me. (I had to punch my own cards and wait a day for the guy behind the glass booth to hand me a foot of bi-fold paper printout because I made one error in the code!) Later in my life the same curiosity led me to become an IT consultant for heath care systems struggling with newly mandated electronic records, not to mention using Photoshop which was invented by two of my Ann Arbor neighbors.

"My point is, you never know what life will present you with—technological change, who you fall in love with, where you will move to, who you sit next to on a plane, when you will lose your job and then miraculously, end up doing something you love much more! You have to keep your eyes, brain and heart open to what life puts in front of you and then have the courage to follow a new path where it leads you.

"I once saw this saying on a slide during a presentation someone was giving about managing change in a stressed organization: 'When one door closes another one opens. But sometimes there's hell in the hallway!'"

Well put. The map we drew for ourselves when we're young can't take into account the changing terrain we find once we actually have to cross it. It's like Robert Frost's famous poem of the fork in the road. Life is a series of forks in the road, or of those doors opening and closing as Steve says. We pick our paths as we go. We do the best we can. And it depends on all kinds of things, some of which you can control, a lot of which you can't. One thing's for sure, though, you can't do everything.

I like to joke that my retirement plan is to keep working, but if I ever do retire, that's when I'll be an art photographer full time. That'll be good enough.

...First, though, I'll need to pick which camera to use! (Just kidding, just kidding....)

Mike
(Thanks to Steve R.)

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

MikeR: "I'm 78, and finally retired last December, but I still haven't figured out what I want to do when I grow up. All I can add here, besides seconding Steve, is that I mostly followed the advice of that great philosopher, Yogi Berra: 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it!'"

mike sinclair: "I've enjoyed this discussion. As someone who has spent his life photographing, the looking back at the many forks we all have taken is noteworthy."

Crabby Umbo: "I made two large mistakes in my life (among many small and medium ones). The first was not to get advanced college degrees when they were so darn cheap back in the early '70s (I believe I was paying 265 dollars a semester at University of Wisconsin before Reagan defunded the colleges), the second was not reading the handwriting on the wall and leaving the mid-west after the Arab oil embargo and most cities, including Chicago, started a 40-year decline and brain drain.

"I started out doing exactly what I wanted as an advertising photographer, and then started having to change it to stay employed from the late '80s on. Many friends who I went to college with who immediately went to the East and West coasts were able to work doing mostly what they wanted to in the business until they decided to 'retire,' whereas by the middle of my career I was no longer operating any way that I wanted to in the industry. Just holding on.

"I ended up chucking it in and finally going to the East coast, but by that time, too late and too old, and I eventually had to come back to the Midwest over family matters.

"The question you need to ask yourself is, did I spend a fair amount of time doing what I wanted to do? By my late 40s, I was spending pretty much all of my time doing nothing I wanted to do. I knew people that fancied themselves as commercial photographers, and they sort of were (not that good), but they ended up being photography teachers because they were good at it, and they could accomplish far more of what they wanted to in photography, doing that.

"I love the person on here that says they retired at 78! I thought I'd never retire (who retires as a photographer?). You retire when the average age of the people buying freelance services is so young, and they don't care how good you are, they want to use their friends and they don't hire you; and when the corporate gig you finally lucked into was pulled from you when they fired everyone over 55 in a corporate reorg. I barely made it to 63 until I had to rely on social security (and not much of it).

"Mike, you sound like you ended up far better than almost everyone I knew in commercial photography, and doing far more that you wanted to as well. I'd call that a plus!"

Comments

[Josh Hawkins]

"...First, though, I'll need to pick which camera to use! (Just kidding, just kidding....)" Have you seen this one over here? I just got this in two days ago. It's really fun. (Old habits die hard.)

[Josh used to be my camera dealer. And how you doin' boy? You need t' call your old friends once in a while! --Mike]

[David Saxe]

I think Steve nailed it. Very well said.

[Gaspar Heurtley]

I’m 38 years old, and when I look back at what I hope will be a lot less than half my life there are a lot of things I don’t like (bad decisions, some bad luck and more bad decisions), but all that got me to where I am right now, enjoying life with my wife and our two little sons.

So no, no regrets at all, I wouldn’t change a thing.

[Steve Rosenblum]

I clicked on the link in David Saxe's comment above which took me to his website where I spent an enjoyable hour viewing his photographs. Everyone who sees this should immediately do the same. What a wonderful body of work!

[JimH]

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”

“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life”.

The quotes are from Plato.

The first was what my wife quoted to the teachers in elementary school when referring particularly to our boys who were not "easy" pupils.

The second relates to all of us.

Thinking back and wondering how different things might have been assumes some determinism, while much of life is chance. We can chart our lives by our education, the economy, relationships, chance events, and more that overwhelm the rational choices (and irrational choices) we made.

Certainly it is human nature to consider the alternative universes we might have been part of, and might be part of even right now if they exist, but what is is.

Learning to accept that is the rational solution.

[Don McConnell]

Coming from a slightly different direction I think, but this seems to dovetail nicely with Kirk Tuck's latest post - 'Keeping your head in the game. Keeping your hands on the gear'.

[Dennis Ng]

Being in Hong Kong, I think last one year and in fact next few hours awaiting POTS to say what he will really did is one drama after the next. What I do is really not important compare with what happen to my city I born in.

[Mark Kinsman]

Better to chose forks than knives.

[Scott]

Someone else said it much better than I could ever say:

Regrets, I've had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption
I planned each chartered course
Each careful step along the byway
But more, much more than this
I did it my way

[Lothar Adler]

I’m glad to see commenter Crabby Umbo back again and shares his thoughts with us.
I always valued his hints and insights, especially the one (some years ago), not to connect your main, important, photo processing computer with the internet, this way he never had computer problems. I followed this simple and wise hint with my two main computers and never had computer problems again. Simple but very true and helpful.
Greetings and thanks from Berlin.