Expiration Date

On the heels of a project shot entirely in the studio using digital equipment, I wanted something different, something to stretch another set of creative muscles.And so I began to make self-portraits on expired film.

As I talked with a few friends about my new project, they all asked the same question. Why was I using expired film?

“It just seems right for someone who’s coming up on his own sell-by date,” I joked.

But there was something more beneath the humor. At 71, the inevitability of aging had not escaped my notice. I had left behind a satisfying career for the unknown world of retirement. My knees didn’t work like they used to. My mother died at age 98, leaving me without living parents. I found my daydreams wandering into the past as often as they imagined the future. And I began writing notes to myself — reminders of the simplest things. What, I wondered, is my life now all about? And what can making photographs about it teach me?

While the project started as a series of self portraits, it expanded to encompass images that represent many parts of my life - my marriage, the landscape in which I find myself, my experience of who I am at this time, and a reconsideration of what my life has been. It is a self-portrait writ large. And while it is tempting to portray aging as only a series of losses - which it indeed is - I also intend to portray the moments of peace, satisfaction, sensuality, and joy that are often left out of our vision of our advanced decades.