“I’m Cadillac. I’m 18. I’ve seen some shit.”

Do I need to say it? This old dog taught me new tricks.

Here we go.

I always believed that emotion, first, then light, maybe, triumphed in photography. 

1. Emotion. 2. Light, maybe. Badda bing, badda boom.

Like when I was first studying photography, the imperfection of Julia Margaret Cameron’s soft focus, highly emotional. evocative portraits just captivated me. Yeah, later influences were Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke White, Cindy Sherman and Annie Leibovitz but my first love was Julia.

Oh, I will add, Julia also vexed me so with that soft focus. I struggled trying to love it and I did because of the emotion I was getting from her work. Let’s face it, I wanted Julia’s technique to be a little more perfect, okay? But I loved it, complicatedly.

What I’ve always had trouble doing was getting emotion in my own work. Oh yeah, for such an emotional crybaby, the thing I wanted to capture the most eluded me.

I was heavy into photography competition for a few years and that was an amazing experience and really was spectacular in learning technique and precision and beauty and storytelling and amazing detail and whatnot. I really enjoyed the learning process of competition. My losers turn out to be more insightful than my winners and the process elevated my skills. 

But then I felt my work got, hear me out, too perfect. I know, it’s not perfect, but I felt like I had choked some life out of the work and hadn’t replaced it with other life. I was boring myself. And you know what happens when you’re bored… you look for something new… which for me turned out to be something old.

Emotion. Sigh. Says someone with so so much emotional baggage. Funny (Dr. Freud), I’ve been a photographer, a reporter, a TV producer, always looking into someone else’s life but not really my own. Does that mean anything? Anything at all?

Even before photography, I wanted my writing to be more creative, I wanted it to feel like the words were just coming out of my mind and I felt I never really achieved that. Stream of consciousness, my teachers called it. I didn’t find my authentic voice. But I recently found a sweepstakes writing award and a first place feature writing plaque with my name on them from the ‘80s. It reminded me by gosh, I could write at one point. Although at this stage, validation isn’t the point.

I photograph animals, most of the time. I love an animal mind, God, I do. There is just something about connecting with their spirits and see them settle into doing the work, the thing, and then rewarding them in their language. I mean, who wouldn’t love that? (Of course, they don’t always do the thing and that’s okay too. We meet where we meet. And they get the reward anyway.)

But that perfection thing was nagging me. I do like perfection, don’t get me wrong, I’m a Virgo, how could I not like perfection? I wanted to break what I was doing and go for flow. For emotion. And guess what? I had to break some things and focus had to go! Yeah. Lighting had to go. I don’t want these to be about the processing. 

The things I worked the hardest at achieving were the things I had to let go of to get the emotion I was looking for. Super soft focus because I have no depth of field, no shutter speed. Rookie mistakes. Well, the difference between me and the rookie, maybe, was that I knew I was making the mistakes but decided something different was the goal. The intent was different.

Dolly Parton said it takes a lot of money to look cheap. I’ll say, it takes a lot of education to look like a beginner again. And yet here we are.

So this last session with Cadillac is nothing but emotion. The lighting sucks. The focus. Not even close to a master level. But I have to shake off some of that quest for technical perfection to get the emotional connection. So these are my baby emotional photos and I hope you see what I see.