Youthful Obsessions

Here's our pink anemone, a late-summer bloomer that's doing really well this year. I was admiring it the other day when I spotted a tiny flower crab spider perched on its uppermost petals. Can you see it, on the closest flower?

Here's an extreme (and slightly blurry) close-up. These spiders lurk on flowers, waiting for bees or other pollinators to fly in for some nectar. When they do, the spiders grab them with those long front legs and eat them. Nature red in tooth and claw!

I ordered a book of Stephen Shore's early photography last week, and it arrived yesterday. Shore is one of my favorite photographers, shooting the kinds of seemingly banal streetscapes that I appreciate -- finding the beauty in the ordinary. He recently released a book of images he made as a teenager in the early '60s, walking around the streets of New York, and wrote an accompanying essay in which he recounted how he got interested in photography. Apparently an uncle gave him a photo processing kit for his sixth birthday (!) and his parents allowed him to turn his bathroom into a darkroom. From then on, he processed his family's photos and when he was eight years old, his family gave him a Ricoh camera. Four years later, they gave him a Nikon SLR. A neighbor gave him a book of Walker Evans' photographs.

"My natural way of learning was to become interested in something and throw myself into it, to become obsessed for a period of time and then move on to something else," he wrote. He never had much interest in formal education, but when his parents sent him to a boarding school in the Hudson Valley he met a teacher who was also a photographer, and who encouraged him. He moved back to Manhattan for high school, wandered the city taking pictures, and famously had the chutzpah to schedule an appointment with Edward Steichen, the director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art. Steichen bought three of his photographs for the museum, and his career was launched.

I'm telling you all this because what struck me, as I read this essay, was the way the adults in his life encouraged him from a very young age -- sometimes to an extraordinary degree. His father was a handbag manufacturer, his mother a homemaker, yet they gave him expensive cameras and allowed him to transform their house. They indulged his obsessive learning style.

I can't help but contrast this with my own parents. They also gave me a camera when I was very young, a Magimatic, and my dad had built a darkroom in our house where he showed me how to process pictures. But after their divorce and my dad's remarriage, they both became strangely reluctant to encourage my interests in photography. My dad took pictures with me a handful of times, allowing me to use his Minolta, but I begged for a decent camera for years and didn't get one until my senior year of high school. And although I was never very interested in photo processing -- I was happy to let the drug store do it -- I would have enjoyed more darkroom time.

I shared Shore's obsessive learning tendencies, but unlike his parents, mine reacted to them negatively. They got exasperated if I spent too much time on any one hobby, and frustrated if I neglected my schoolwork. During a period in my early teens when I was consumed with taping music off the radio, I remember my mother saying, "I don't know why you have to become so obsessed with everything." That criticism nagged at me. And yet, what if they had indulged those obsessions? What if they'd encouraged me to learn about recording, how it worked, how to manage levels, how to splice and edit? Maybe I'd be a sound engineer. Or maybe not.

I don't think they were bad parents. I'm not saying that. I did get encouragement in some hobbies -- beer can collecting, stamp collecting, shell collecting, and yes, photography. But I think they were consumed by their own lives and dramas -- particularly my mother -- and my father was constrained by a self-imposed need to treat me, my brother and my step-siblings (the children of his second wife) fairly and equally. He was reluctant to spend too much time or money on any one of us, because he'd have to do the same for the others. (It's not coincidental that the hobbies he most encouraged, like collecting beer cans, were those I shared with my siblings.) Shore, as an only child, didn't have that kind of competition.

I guess all I'm saying is, I wish my parents had seen my youthful obsessions as a good thing, rather than an annoyance. And I wish they'd paid more attention to helping me channel those obsessions in productive ways. I still might not be Stephen Shore, but I've always felt like I missed a crucial early stage in developing my photographic interests, particularly. Then again, I suppose there are plenty of people who come to things late in life and excel nonetheless.