As I scan in hundreds (thousands) of negatives taken over the past 45 plus years I realize that I truly am an observer of life.  From the "required" photography class that I "HAD TO TAKE" in art school to the guy that is always the one shooting the pictures, it is apparent that the camera has cemented my status as one that is always behind the lens and rarely in front of it.  My wife takes a photo of me every now and then which is good in the respect that at least people know I was there also.

   As Jay Maisel said when asked what motivates him to  take a photo, he said that it is because it was of something he had never seen before.  That partially explains the thousands of photos that I took when I was living in Japan.  A simple walk or bicycle ride into the community was like being exactly what it was - an outsider allowed to see all of the different and unique things that are a culture different than your own.  It seems like everything I saw was different including the houses, the towns, the mail boxes, the cars, and of course the people.  EVERYTHING, was different than what I was used to even though I considered myself fairly well traveled in my 24 years having lived in so many different places and attended so many different schools that what I consider one of the most important things anyone has ever given me is the list of places and schools I attended up through high school (addresses included) that my mother passed on to me.

   Some of my clearest memories was of the place that we lived for the shortest amount of time.  We lived in Excel, Alabama for six weeks in 1964, a town so small that the entire school, K-12 was in one building.  It was way different than anything I had ever seen or experienced before. I wish I would have had a camera then!

   Photography has allowed me to document the ordinary, interesting, and extraordinary things I observed along the way but I realize that I am not in the photos of my life.  The photos are of the life that I have experienced and I'm OK with not being in most of them since my wife has captured enough photos here and there to show my daughters that I was "there" also and the photos they are looking at just did not appear by themselves.  They are what I experienced in life.

Mark