…It’s not as if I believe that everything works together to bring us to a particular predestined point.  But I do believe that everything we experience can be seen as related, if we are open to something beyond our original intentions and are paying attention to the myriad possibilities.  All the walks I’ve taken, all the experiences I’ve had, including the devastating ones, are part of who I am.  Insofar as I have the capacity to take another walk, or to repsond with a whole heart to the beauty of the world, or to engage with a person who has a different perspective, then there is something in life that I can confirm…

John Elder,
Interview in The Sun, June 2013

Statements such as the above really resonate with me as I get older and am more than ever conscious of the passage of time.  At many different stages of my life, I have looked back and tried to put into a larger perspective, so to speak, the sum total of my experiences up to that point, but at 71 this exercise seems to take on a new sense of poignancy, if not urgency.

How many Springs do I have left to enjoy the beauty of the azaleas in bloom, or in which to smell the memory-intoxicating fragrance of legustrums or gardenias?  Grateful I am indeed that I can still appreciate the beauty of these things,  the power of the aesthetic as well as the sensory experience they represent and provide.

When you can do this, there is affirmation of life in its totality.  When I can enjoy the excitement of the discovery on a back road way out in the middle of nowhere of a perfectly intact abandoned farmstead and photograph it as I did similar subjects and scenes 40 years ago in another part of rural South Carolina, then I am again aware that all my experiences are related, that they are integrally part of who I am today and who I was as a young man 50 years ago just starting out in life.

Life is whole, connected.   I am aware of this now whenever I relive events from that past.   Memory is a precious gift.

An abandoned farmstead in rural South Carolina, discovered and photographed in 2013:

https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/3X9D498KD2

These are iconic rural scenes for me. The cumulative stories of generations of farm families lie in ghostly repose in these weathered old structures — empty, baking in the Southern summer sun, whispering secrets to a curious and fascinated passerby with a camera, heading home, who just happened to look to the side out the window of his car and spotted that house, barn and several other out buildings, off a little distance on a side road. If he had not turned his gaze to the left at that exact moment, the farmstead would have been lost to him forever.

Ten years later, I remember my first glimpse of that farm just as clearly as I remember first seeing the big country house and abandoned railroad depot in a tiny town not far out in the country from where my aunt lived. That was in 1973. I have pictures of that old house, and I think of the railroad depot. But I was equally excited to come upon and photograph both of those vanishing remnants of rural life in South Carolina, 40 years apart, the first time as a young man just starting out in life, inquisitive and ready to explore a world so different from his origins, and then, those decades later, a much older man whose enthusiasm for exploring and photographing such places has never dimmed. It never will disappear.

Side porch of the old house I photographed in 1973. In those days long before digital cameras, all my photography was in black and white, and I developed and printed the picture’s in a friend’s darkroom.

https://flic.kr/p/2o9gRHz