Anniversary, memory and meaning

Show Note Summary and Thoughts

Thanks for joining me this week for the Perceptive Photographer podcast. Today is November 2, 2026, which is always a rough day for me. It’s the anniversary of the day I learned about my brother’s passing. It is hard to believe that it has been nine years.

The challenge of processing

So this week’s podcast is a little random because I was struggling to figure out the motivation to record anything last week. It finally hit me that I was thinking a lot about those first days. One of the things I have been learning is that while I feel like I have done lots of work to process the emotional and psychological impacts of his passing, there is always a physical toll on me this time of year. Most years, I either get really sick or have some health issues that result in ER visits. These always seem to come up in November and December. Part of what I’m learning is that there is more that needs to be taken care of where the body remembers and hasn’t processed the grief as much as my mind has.

Depth and complexity

In learning this sum of the parts, I got to thinking about the depth of the images that resonate with me from that time in my life or anytime, for that matter. I think that’s one of the things about our photographic process that can be applied from what I’m learning every year that I go through this. That there is a depth and complexity to who we are as people and the more we are willing to understand, share and process the entirety of that complexity, the more interesting we are as individuals and therefore the more interesting we are as community members and ultimately the more interesting our art and photographs become.

Lesson we take from others.

This was all pretty interesting because part of what I wanted to talk about before starting to struggle with figuring out why I was having a hard time recording a podcast last week was that I was going to be talking about a quote from the book Photographers on Photography by Henry Carroll, from an interview he did with Ron Jude. He asked Ron what his favorite Photographic quote was and why, and the quote that he came up with was by Lewis Baltz.

“Anyone can take pictures; what’s difficult is thinking about them, organizing them and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That’s really where the work begins for an artist”

Ron then goes on to say, “What I offer as an artist doesn’t lie solely in craft or visual acrobatics. It’s in t