Anatomy of an image: What Remains

This is the first in what I hope will be a recurring set of posts, looking at images with a brief explanation of my thought process.

We had the great good fortune of having all of our nuclear family together here on Cape Cod in July, including the newest addition, Miles, who experienced the ocean for the first time. Having travelled from LA, DC, and Maryland, it was a wonderful visit, and we miss them dearly. What no one tells you about having adult children is how rarely you get to see them all together; this was the first time since early 2023 that we were all together. It’s much more fun to gather for vacation than for a funeral!

When everyone had gone, headed back to busy lives, it was cleanup time. Always a melancholy time when the kids leave, vacuuming under the coffee table and finding one of Miles’ remaining Cheerios struck a chord that required of me an immediate response. The cell phone, Snapseed, and five minutes, and this is that marriage between emotion and technology.

In sitting with this image, I was reminded of the Sally Mann documentary, What Remains, about her husband’s illness and her dog’s death. (I took my kids to see this on Fathers’ Day in 2005 when they were 10-15 years old, a Father’s Day seared in their memories.) My own (very short) documentary about tides, illness, birth and death (The Last Of Who I Am) uses images I’ve shot, and will soon be revised to add this image to the mix. An earlier piece (John’s Cage) documents my father’s journey with Parkinsons Disease. While this season of life has been somewhat less than cheerful, it has nonetheless been artistically rich, for which I can only have enormous gratitude. In the end, love is what remains.