I’ve often wondered what it means to truly belong somewhere. In my younger years, I drifted through life much like the wind—restless, untethered, always moving. I was a wanderer, a roamer, a vagabond in every sense of the word.
My parents, if they were alive today, would likely recall a teenage me, always on the move, devoid of the anchor that words like “purpose,” “goals,” and “objectives” imply. I was a person of no fixed abode, a rolling stone gathering no moss, and to be honest, I never felt all that bad about it.
It was who I was, deep down, through and through.
Hell, it was the 60s and 70s. I wasn’t alone.
There’s a certain beauty in impermanence, a sense of freedom in the transient state of being. Back then, curiosity was my compass, and the ephemeral nature of life was my guide. While this way of living may have caused conflict during my youth—when the world around me seemed to demand stability and certainty—it was this very impermanence that honed my instincts as a photographer. My camera, eventually, became my constant companion, a tool to capture the fleeting moments of beauty that seemed to disappear as quickly as they came.
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I’ve often found myself relating to the great Bob Dylan, a kindred spirit in the art of wandering. Like Dylan, I’ve never been content to stay in one place for too long. His lyrics, infused with a sense of restlessness and a refusal to be pinned down, resonate deeply with me. Dylan once said, “He not busy being born is busy dying,” and perhaps it was this idea that drove me to keep moving, to keep searching for that next burst of inspiration.
My photographic journey has always been less about following a path and more about letting the path find me. It’s in those moments of instinct, impulse, and intuition that I’ve found my greatest work. The spontaneity of it all—the way the light falls just right, the way a shadow stretches across the pavement, or the way a stranger’s expression tells a thousand stories—these are the moments I live for. They’re the moments that remind me why I pick up my camera in the first place.
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Recently, on one of my travels, I met a beautiful woman who asked me, point blank, “Are you a poet?” Her question took me by surprise, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized she was right. Yes, fucking yes. My camera is my pen, and the world is my canvas. My sole purpose, whether it’s right or wrong, good or bad, is to make this world a more beautiful and lyrical place. Every photograph I take is a verse, a stanza in the ongoing poem of life. Thank you for noticing. Wanna have a drink? What is your story?
It’s the beauty of things that I treasure most, the fleeting moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. This is what I seek to capture and share with the world—a glimpse of the ephemeral, a reminder that even in our wandering, there is meaning. Like Dylan, I’ll keep drifting, letting the wind take me where it will, my camera always in hand, ready to turn life’s fleeting moments into something timeless and beautiful.
These are photos from Kirkwall, Scotland. I remember this day well. It was cold, windy, and rainy.
I had to work like hell to find the color I’m used to capturing.
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Jack
