At the end of August 1998, my family returned from the last of four summer-long trips. In addition to the end to the summer trips, I could see that the kids were older and more mature, less kids and more young adults.
When we returned home, my children Emily and Greg enjoyed the remaining week of vacation at home. One afternoon, Emily was swinging on the swing-set, into and out of the afternoon sun. The camera was close at hand, and without thought I picked it up and exposed several frames.
Photography is an interesting artistic pursuit; sometimes you know you have something good as you release the shutter. Other times, the act of exposure is almost unconscious, and you don’t realize what you’ve got until you see the image on the film. In this case, it was a week later that I developed the film and saw among 34 frames of little merit one frame that took my breath away.
That frame is the first image in this show - End of Summer, August, 1998. In that image, Emily is captured at the end of the swing’s travel, suspended against the afternoon light. Her hair, suspended in the brief moment of weightlessness, glows in a halo around her head. Despite her being engaged in the childhood activity of swinging, her posture and direct gaze speak more of early adulthood than of childhood. To me that single image summed up that point in Emily’s life – suspended at the brink, momentarily weightless and stationary between childhood and adulthood.
The moment I saw that image, this project was born. I resolved to document the next few months of Emily’s life – to show her as she made the transition from older child to young adult. But such endeavors have a life of their own, and only days had passed before Greg had edged his way into the photographs (starting with the image presented here as Greg Joins In). Emily and Greg are, to my infinite delight, good friends as well as siblings, and I realized that I could no more separate the images of Greg and Em than I could disentangle their lives. By the time the few months had passed, the scope of the project had turned into a year, and at the beginning of the summer of 1999, it seemed to stretch into the indefinite future. Childhood, it seems, doesn’t come to an abrupt end so much as it becomes a smaller part of each day, with being an adult taking over a larger and larger share as we get older.
Like childhood, this project doesn’t seem to be coming to a definite end. The collection of images so far numbers around 100, with more being added.
