I was never a good student. Indeed, in high school and graduate studies I barely scraped by. My mind was unruly. It would wander but then arbitrarily seize upon some select fragment of my studies and it would become indelibly fixed in my mind.
My first year in college English we were assigned T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to read. Most of the poetry went over my head except for this particular selection from Little Gidding. It’s stayed with me to this day:
And the end of all are exploring
Will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time.
As a middle- aged man, although I’d been making photographs since I was fourteen, I took photography courses at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore to hone my skills. The class consisted mostly of young people so I was the old man of the class. They tolerated my presence with curiosity and good humor, as they might regard some toothless dinosaur mingling in their midst.
The class held periodic critiques of one another’s work. The picture I chose to show on my first critique I thought was marvelous. I took it at Baltimore Harbor. The picture showed a seagull on a dock piling perched stone still but appearing regal. I was struck with how the bird stood and I snapped a picture. The picture was clear, had full range of tones and I was sure that my class would be dazzled.
As the critique began I eagerly waited comments. When it was my turn, the heat suddenly went up. One young person said, ” Wow man, this is such a cliché, I mean what are you trying to say.” One young girl, following his comments blithely reported that she hated seagulls and did I know that they were not only carnivores, “like cannibals, man” but that the guano they left all over Baltimore was really gross and “totally icky.” And on it went. I felt as though carnivorous seagulls had surrounded me and I was being pecked apart.
I was particularly devastated because I loved photographing marine scenes and I thought that that this represented the pinnacle of my nature photographs. I was being told in no uncertain terms that my work was banal and uninteresting.
The next day I went to my instructor, Paul, and told him how hurt I was, particularly with the implication that the things I liked to photograph were superficial, “Hallmark like” as another classmate had commented.
Paul smiled and said, “Oh, that’s not the point. You must always stay with the things that you love most. Your task is to return to them and see them in new ways.” The invitation to see in what’s familiar something new, and find in what’s new something familiar was a signature moment in my artistic endeavors but also in developing my spiritual life. The suggestion I took from it was not unlike William Blake’s classic words: “To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower.” It takes a second look.
I believe there’s an essence to things. There’s an essence in people – their spirit, if you will. Their spirit always totals more than the sum of their parts. I understand that means treating first my impressions tentatively while continuing my explorations. Things may seem radically different after the second, third or fourth look.
With my camera I returned to many of the same marine sites I had photographed. I saw many more possibilities for making engaging images. The critique, although hard to hear, had opened my eyes.
At about that time, my wife, Jo, and I were planning a move to the Shore and went house hunting.
Over a few months we explored possibilities in Dorchester, Queen Anne’s and several here in Talbot County and nothing seemed to feel right. Late in our search our realtor, vexed, asked just what was it that we were looking for. We weren’t sure.
Early in our explorations we saw a house. The interior was filled with furniture, interesting, but cluttered for our tastes. The exterior looked like a bunkhouse. We dismissed it and continued exploring for several weeks and on a whim returned to the “bunkhouse.”
On the first look we hadn’t noticed how, among all the houses we’d seen, this one let the beauty of the outside in. The dark wood interior, rather than seeming oppressive as it did at first, we now experienced as warm and welcoming, the way subdued lighting can create an intimate atmosphere. We knew this was where we wanted to live. In short, we had, in this particular exploration, arrived where we’d started, and knew the place for the first time.
Perhaps I remembered those words from Eliot’s Little Gidding that I first heard in college because I knew at some subliminal level I would, in many of my life explorations, be returning to where I started to find what I was looking for.
In the way people assign names to their homes here on the Shore, we’ve called ours, “Second Look.”
Write a Letter to the Editor on this Article
We encourage readers to offer their point of view on this article by submitting the following form. Editing is sometimes necessary and is done at the discretion of the editorial staff.