Glad I Started Late

A first camera near seventy, Nietzsche's amor fati, and the art of subtracting

Which gatherings to join. Where to go on a photo outing. What to plan, and how. These days I settle all of it with two questions. Is this something that will never come into the world unless I make it? And is this worth the time I have left? It was only recently, when I began writing for a photo-essay book, that I truly started asking them.

Nietzsche has a phrase: amor fati. Love your fate. Everything that has happened to you, the good and the bad — not merely to endure it, but to love it. At first it struck me as too harsh. Enduring is hard enough. How is anyone supposed to manage love?

I picked up a camera at an age approaching seventy. Among people my age were photographers who had worked for decades and were starting to talk about retiring. I could barely handle the camera. Then, fiddling with Photoshop to fix my pictures, I stumbled into AI. By any measure, I started late — very late.

At first, too late was all I could feel. Edging into unfamiliar territory does not get easier with age. Honestly, photography is still hard for me, and making a single AI piece is no small thing either. But having started, I am trying to do it properly. In every camera class I am the slowest one in the room. I ask the same question twice, and wander for a long time through what everyone else already knows. Bearing that small embarrassment is part of the price of a late start. Which is why, when I meet younger colleagues still working, I tell them: start your photography before you retire.

Photographer friends my age say: why so fierce about it? Take good pictures, pretty pictures, enjoy it as a hobby — isn't that enough? They are not wrong. But for me there is something more urgent in it than a hobby can hold. Lately the days when I think quietly about death have grown more frequent. And out of that, two things slowly came into view: what, in the life remaining to me, I will no longer let slip carelessly by — and what will never come into the world unless I am the one to make it. As those two settled into place, a corner of my mind grew quietly urgent. The sense of time running down is precisely what makes clear what matters.

Starting late has let me subtract. I have put down much of the greed of the camera years, the urge to capture everything. Instead I look back over my life and ask which of the things that are mine should be told in which medium. Learning advanced technique matters, of course. But before that, I ask which vessel best fits what I am trying to say. Some stories are best carried by a single photograph. Some only take shape through AI. And some, in the end, arrive nowhere except through writing. As that discernment slowly grows, I have come to see that choosing a tool is really deciding what to say. A quicker hand would have skipped past that question. Being slow, I stay before it a long time.

For a while I tried to solve everything with AI. But these days I sometimes pick up the camera again, because there are things I want to photograph. What has disappeared is the old blind shooting — just in case, might need it someday. Midjourney, too: there was a time I felt compelled to use up every paid hour or it would gnaw at me, and I have let some of that go. I learned late how much the writing matters, so now the writing walks alongside the photographs and the AI. What to add matters less than what to subtract. That, it seems, is the work of this age.

Only now does amor fati sound different to me. To love your fate is not to gild the past by force. It is to accept that the long way around is part of you — that the lateness and the hesitating made the person now standing here. Because I was late, I was able to shed. Because death keeps me company, I was able to become urgent. Had I come early, wouldn't I have only tried to possess more?

So I no longer apologize for starting late. The slow eye sees what the quick hand misses. There are landscapes visible only from the place where a late start stands. I am glad I was late. Without the long way around, there would be no urgency in me now. That old command — love your fate — I am only beginning, past seventy, to understand a little.