Six Years and One Day Old

Tonight I watched my son find something that might matter to him for the rest of his life, and the whole thing happened almost by accident. He turned six yesterday, and because he has always wanted a camera, I bought him one that looks enough like a toy that a six-year-old can just grab it and start exploring. Underneath that disguise it is a real little camera with a huge memory card, video and 4K output, but I didn't give him a lesson, a photography assignment or a list of things he should go shoot.

I just gave him the camera.

Within the first thirty minutes he had already started taking pictures of whatever caught his attention. A car. The light coming through the trees. People. Himself. Me. Random pieces of the world that apparently looked interesting enough through his eyes to stop and capture. Some of the pictures are crooked, some are strange, and some are exactly what you would expect from a kid who has had a camera for half an hour. That's also what makes them fucking great.

He wasn't trying to make content. He wasn't thinking about whether somebody would like the picture or whether it belonged in a portfolio. Nobody had taught him composition, lighting, framing or any of the thousand technical things he could learn later. He was just looking at the world and deciding, for the first time, which pieces of it he wanted to keep.

That hit me harder than I expected because I don't think I would have thought about photography this way if I hadn't met Isaiah Bradford. Knowing Isaiah has changed what photography means to me. Before, I could appreciate a great photograph, but I mostly thought about the camera and the finished image. Watching somebody actually live the work made me understand how much of photography happens everywhere except the shutter button.

It is the passion and the dedication. It is the weird scheduling where the thing you need to photograph happens during dinner, lunch or the time everybody else gets to spend with family. It is travel, waiting, noticing things other people walk past, needing to stay artistic even when creativity isn't conveniently scheduled, and dealing with stretches where there isn't enough work followed by ten days where there is way too damn much of it.

I do not envy that life. I respect the hell out of it.

Isaiah and his generation have made me look at photography differently because they seem to understand instinctively that the camera is only part of the job. The person behind it matters. The way that person sees people matters, the way they treat people matters, and the amount of love they are willing to put into something that may only exist for a fraction of a second matters.

And now that influence somehow made its way down another generation.

My son was six years and one day old when I handed him that little camera. I have no idea whether photography will still matter to him six months from now, much less when he is sixteen or thirty-six, and I don't want to manufacture a destiny for him because he took some cool pictures on his first day. Maybe this becomes one of the great passions of his life. Maybe the camera ends up in a drawer next year and he moves on to something completely different.

Either outcome is fine.

What matters to me is that he got the chance to find out. There are probably thousands of things our kids could fall in love with that they never discover simply because nobody puts the thing in their hands. Sometimes parenting is teaching. Sometimes it is coaching, correcting, protecting and explaining. And sometimes maybe it is just noticing a little spark, giving them the tool and getting the hell out of the way.

That's what happened tonight. No lesson. No plan. No “go take a picture of this.” I handed a six-year-old a camera, and thirty minutes later I was scrolling through the first photographs he had ever deliberately gone out and made for himself.

I kept thinking about Isaiah while I looked at them. A friendship he probably never expected to have anything to do with my son's childhood had quietly changed the way I saw an entire art form. That changed what I was willing to put in my son's hands, and now there is at least a possibility that a passion moves forward because one person cared deeply enough about his own craft that somebody else started seeing it differently.

That is a pretty wild chain of events.

I don't know what my son will do with photography. I don't need to know. I just know that at six years and one day old, he walked around with a camera and started deciding which moments were worth saving.

For his first thirty minutes, that is more than enough.

And Isaiah, if you ever read this years from now, thank you. You made me realize photography is more than a camera, and without meaning to, you may have helped a six-year-old discover something about himself too. I respect the hell out of the way you work, the way you care and the passion you put into what you do.

Love you like a brother.