A House Without an Art Vocabulary
When I was growing up in the small town of Reading, Massachusetts, language had a very specific job. It was there to communicate, not to contemplate. My dad, a popular high school math teacher and an even more popular head football coach, spoke in the clean, efficient cadence of someone who valued clarity over curiosity. My mom, beautiful, caring, giving, and dutiful, spoke in the language of home—family updates, meal planning, church rhythms, the gentle logistics of keeping a life stitched together. Between the two of them, there was no real lexicon for art, no lingering over metaphor, no reaching for the ineffable. It simply wasn’t part of their upbringing, and so it wasn’t part of ours.
Our house, and forgive me for saying it this way, was more fart than art. More “how’d the team do?” than “how did that make you feel?” More meat and potatoes than mystery and poetry. When something was beautiful, it was “nice.” When something stirred emotion, it was “lovely.” When something impressed, it was “really good.” These weren’t lazy words; they were sufficient words. They did the job. They closed the loop. They moved the conversation along.
And this isn’t a criticism. It’s an observation. A recognition of the environment that shaped me before I ever picked up a camera, before I ever started trying to describe what I was seeing in ways that stretched beyond utility.
The Late Arrival of Language
Tonight, I was editing photos from one of my favorite places on Cape Cod—Chapin Beach in Dennis, Massachusetts. The light was doing what Cape light does: stretching, softening, wrapping itself around the edges of things like it has all the time in the world. The photos are decent. Maybe even above average. But that’s not the point. The point is what happens next, after the shutter clicks, after the image settles, when I begin to reach for language.
Because now, decades later, I don’t just see a photograph as “nice” or “good.” I feel compelled to describe it with a different kind of vocabulary—one that tries, however imperfectly, to honor what’s actually there. The way the tide pulls a diagonal line through the frame, creating tension between foreground and horizon. The way the color temperature shifts from warm sand to cool water, creating a subtle push and pull. The way a lone figure in the distance becomes less a subject and more a punctuation mark in an otherwise quiet sentence.
This language didn’t come from my parents. It came from years of looking, of failing, of trying to articulate why one image works and another doesn’t. It came from books, from photographers I admired, from the slow accumulation of visual experiences that demanded a more nuanced response than “nice shot.”
And yet, as I sit with this, I find myself wanting to gently push back on my own assumption that this newer, more elaborate language is somehow better.
The Illusion of a Superior Vocabulary
It’s easy, especially after years in a creative field, to equate complexity with depth. To believe that because we can describe something in more detail, we are somehow seeing it more clearly. But that’s not always true. Sometimes, a more elaborate vocabulary doesn’t deepen the experience; it distances us from it. It turns something immediate and felt into something analyzed and categorized.
When my parents said something was “lovely,” they weren’t being reductive. They were being direct. They were naming their experience in a way that was honest and unpretentious. There was no performance in it, no need to impress, no hidden agenda to sound more insightful than they actually felt. The word carried exactly the weight they intended—no more, no less.
In contrast, my own language, shaped by years of photography and a desire to articulate the subtleties of light, color, and design, can sometimes feel like it’s doing too much. Like it’s trying to prove something. Like it’s reaching not just to describe the image, but to validate my place as someone who understands it.
And that’s where the tension lies. Because while my vocabulary has expanded, my responsibility to use it wisely has expanded as well.
Seeing Versus Saying
At its core, photography is about seeing. Not describing, not explaining, not justifying—seeing. The act of noticing what others might pass by, of framing it, of capturing it in a way that feels intentional. The language comes later, if it comes at all.
My parents, in their own way, were excellent at this kind of seeing, even if they didn’t have the words to elaborate on it. My dad could watch a football game and instantly understand the flow, the strategy, the subtle shifts in momentum. My mom could walk into a room and immediately sense the emotional temperature, who was comfortable, who wasn’t, what needed to be said or left unsaid. They were deeply perceptive people. They just didn’t translate that perception into the kind of language I now use when talking about photographs.
So maybe the difference isn’t in the seeing itself, but in what we do with it afterward. I turned my seeing into a craft, and over time, into a vocabulary. They kept theirs closer to the bone, expressed in simpler terms, but no less real.
Respecting the Roots While Expanding the Branches
There’s a temptation, when we outgrow the language of our upbringing, to look back on it as limited or insufficient. But that’s a mistake. That language was the foundation. It taught us how to communicate, how to connect, how to name our experiences in ways that others could understand. Without it, there is no next step.
What I’ve developed over the years isn’t a replacement for my parents’ vocabulary; it’s an extension of it. A layering. A branching out. The word “nice” may not capture the full complexity of a photograph, but it captures something essential—the initial response, the gut-level reaction that says, “this works for me.”
Everything I add on top of that—talk of light direction, compositional balance, color harmony—is an attempt to unpack why it works. But the why should never overshadow the fact that it does.
Holding Both Languages at Once
So here I am, sitting with these images from Chapin Beach, aware of the language I’ve built and the language I came from. And instead of choosing one over the other, I’m starting to see the value in holding both.
There’s a place for the simple, unadorned “that’s lovely.” There’s also a place for the more detailed exploration of what makes it so. The trick is knowing when each is appropriate, and not mistaking one for inherently superior to the other.
Because at the end of the day, the photograph doesn’t care how we describe it. It exists on its own terms, shaped by light, time, and the choices we made in a fraction of a second. Our words are just an attempt to meet it there, to make sense of what we felt when we first saw it.
And maybe that’s the quiet reconciliation here. That the language I’ve developed isn’t a departure from my parents, but a continuation of something they started in a different way. They taught me to notice, even if they didn’t teach me how to say what I noticed.
The rest, it turns out, I had to learn on my own.
Click.
Jack.
