inspired

A satellite image of yesterday’s inauguration, taken by the GeoEye-1 satellite. To the right is the blue-roofed Capitol building and the tiny brown clusters are the more than a million people who gathered at the National Mall. Download your own high-res version: Photo courtesy of GeoEye.

These are the times when I wish I could paint the world with words, spout imagery rooted in beauty and love and inspiration and meaning more than the combination of vowels and consonants and dashes and periods. I wish I could say how I felt yesterday as I sat glued to the TV and radio and Internet to see our country’s fate change, its history honored, its future become hopeful. Hope: What an amazing word! What a hard-won delicacy I want to savor. What a precious, precious thing to have suddenly, like a big, deep breath that fills your ribcage with undying optimism. Truly, amazing.

Sometime last year I bought myself a little plastic camera, a leaky light raft of a camera that from the very start made no promise of perfection. But it was perfect for me, I thought, because I can teach myself a lesson on letting go. I have a wicked addiction to perfectionism that I war with. Sometimes it’s bloody, bloody, this endless fight to resist trying to be perfect all the time. And of course I’m not, so part of the battle is admitting it. Here, Internet! I admit it!

So this film is the first of my perfectly imperfect experiment. It had been tumbling around in my car for a couple of weeks after I decided it was about time to see what happened. Not that it was any big thing. I was just preoccupied with other things. And these are what I found, these hidden gems in the roll. Gems to me, anyway. Rough and tumble, blurry and imperfect. 

I’ve been collecting small bits of inspiration and today I found Jamie Livingston, or, rather, found out about Jamie Livingston. He took one Polaroid photograph a day for 18 years, from the time he was a student at Bard to the day he died. Some are missing from the collection, but the ones that remain — and there’s more than 6,000 of them, have been shown in various incarnations.

It’s an amazing, inspiring story and one fitting, I think, to kick off Thanksgiving week. I’m thinking a lot lately — as I’m sure tons of people are — about things for which I am thankful. One of the biggest things are unexpected shots of inspiration, and, in particular, those I know and those I know of who inspire me. I didn’t know about Jamie or his life — even though there’s been a lot written about him, from at the New York Times to a bevy of websites in his honor — but he’s inspired me to think, to look and to consider my own longevity and commitment.

If you’d like to learn more, here are some websites to spend some time on:

Hugh Crawford’s collection of all of Jamie’s Polaroids

Images from the 2007 art show of Livingston’s photographs, as they appeared at Bard College

Another way to view the photos, this time in a flipbook

And here are a couple of my own Polaroids, taken several months ago on walks up the Blue Ridge Parkway and through my West Asheville neighborhood, respectively. My own small shots, posted in his honor.