For fifty years I have lived a life through a lens.
I have seen,
noticed,
observed,
composed,
and captured.
Faces.
Places.
Spaces.
Click.
The shutter falls and rises again like a heartbeat. Each press, another pulse of memory. Many things I understood; many more things were beyond the reach of understanding. Photography has never been about perfect comprehension. It has always been about feeling, about experiencing, about being present in the fragile seconds that slip through fingers too quickly.
When you see things through a lens, you never look at life the same again.
Click.
The lens introduces you to sacredness, specialness, uniqueness. Through the lens, you bleed. You cry. You rejoice. You understand. The act of photographing is less about holding on to the world and more about allowing the world to hold on to you.
Click.
You join a world of light, color, design. Lines become whispers of geometry. Shadows grow teeth. A child’s smile becomes scripture. A stranger’s wrinkles become poetry.
The ordinary becomes extraordinary.
The fleeting becomes eternal.
The unnoticed becomes unforgettable.
Click.
Through the lens, you begin to understand yourself. The people in your life. The tenderness of intimacy. The jaggedness of loss. The gravity of family. Photography is not only an act of seeing outward but a mirror bending inward, reflecting who you are, who you were, and who you wish you could become.
Click.
Every photograph is an act of translation. The world speaks its language—light and form, chaos and silence—and the photographer translates it into a vocabulary of pixels, grains, tones, shades. Sometimes the translation is faithful. Other times, it is fractured, approximate, incomplete. But always, it is yours. A photograph is a footprint in time, a confession of presence: I was here. I saw. I felt. I pressed the button.
Click.
Half a century behind a camera has taught me this: photographs are not answers. They are questions dressed in silver and color. They ask, What is beauty? What is memory? What is truth?
The lens does not solve the riddles of life. It sharpens them. It renders them with clarity, so sharp they cut. Yet even in the cutting, there is healing.
Click.
Faces pass before me. Children with popsicles melting down their hands. Old men in Havana playing dominos under the shade of a ceiba tree. Lovers whispering secrets under neon light. A widow, holding a folded flag against her chest. Each face a galaxy. Each expression a history. Each photograph a doorway into someone else’s forever.
Click.
Places, too, have spoken through my viewfinder. Deserts in West Texas where heat shimmers like mirages of truth. Cathedrals where stained glass baptizes the air in blue and red. Small towns with their wide spots in the road, forgotten by maps but immortalized in memory. I have stood at overlooks, I have crouched in alleys, I have sat on sidewalks with my back pressed against brick, waiting for light to lean just so.
Click.
Through the lens I have come to understand that space is not empty. It is filled—with silence, with waiting, with potential. The way a beam of light slices through dust motes in an abandoned room. The way the ocean exhales against the rocks, again and again, ancient as breath itself. The way a single tree stands alone in a field and yet is never truly alone, because sky and shadow keep it company.
Click.
A photograph is not about perfection. It is about attention. Attention is the rarest and purest form of love. When you aim a lens, you declare: This matters. This moment. This person. This sliver of existence. You choose it from the infinite stream of everything else. You frame it. You give it weight. You crown it with meaning.
Click.
Sometimes photography breaks your heart. You photograph your parents, and years later you realize those frames were their last good days. You photograph your children, and the images grow older with you, outpacing the little faces you once knew. You photograph strangers and wonder if they are still alive. The camera reminds you that nothing stands still, not even in a photograph. Change seeps in, relentless.
Click.
Other times, photography saves you. It saves you from numbness, from blindness, from walking through life asleep. It asks you to stop, to notice, to witness. You put your eye to the glass, and suddenly the world rearranges itself into possibility. Pain becomes shape. Loss becomes texture. Joy becomes light.
Click.
The lens does not only capture—it teaches. It teaches patience, for light rarely obeys hurried hearts. It teaches humility, for the world will always be bigger than your ability to frame it. It teaches gratitude, for every image is a gift given once, then gone.
Click.
Through the years, I have learned that photography is not about possession. You cannot own what you photograph. The mountain does not belong to you. The child’s laughter does not belong to you. The river flowing through the canyon will continue whether you capture it or not. What photography gives you is not ownership, but relationship. A deeper intimacy with the living world. A covenant with time.
Click.
I have also learned that photography is not only about seeing but about being seen. You point a lens at someone, and they reveal themselves in ways they might not to anyone else. The lens becomes a confessional, a bridge, a stage. To photograph someone well is to honor their presence, to acknowledge their dignity, to say without words: I see you. You exist. You matter.
Click.
After fifty years, I know this: photography is not merely an art form. It is a way of living. It is how I navigate grief and grace. How I locate myself in a world too vast to comprehend. How I hold on to the threads of meaning in a fabric that is constantly unraveling.
Click.
The camera has been my passport. My diary. My teacher. My companion. My confessor. My mirror. It has introduced me to beauty I would have walked past, to people I would have never spoken to, to truths I would have never wrestled with.
Click.
Through the lens, the world is both more fragile and more fierce, more fleeting and more eternal. Through the lens, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Through the lens, life itself becomes art.
Click.
And maybe, after all these years, this is the only truth I know: photography is not about capturing life. It is about being captured by it.
Click.
Jack.
