It’s been almost a year since I retired after a 36-year long career as a wire service photojournalist. I spent much of the first part of the year grappling with no longer having a career and a monthly pay check. Except for a brief one-year period between jobs with UPI (United Press International) and AFP (Agence France Presse) in 1984, I have been continually employed. So, the idea that I did not need to be continually on-call for breaking news or tied into what was happening around me or concerned about e-mails that I needed to deal with or with the many other things that being a one-man bureau in one of the most newsworthy cities in the world requires, was quite a welcome relief.
It was time to decide what I really wanted to do. Fortunately, I have some other income, and though the monthly pay check was always appreciated, I was free to figure out how I would like to spend the rest of my life. I could keep busy trying to categorize and put into some sense all the imagery and experiences both professionally and personally that I have had since I can remember. And at some point, I will. I am a curious individual by nature. So learning about the world around me has always interested me. History and it’s significance and how it impacts our day-to-day living also fascinates me. Adventure, discovering new things and going in search of something (a quest, of sorts) has always attracted me.
So I thought to myself……. I have been taking pictures, doing videos, writing down thoughts, researching topics of interest, watching programs and reading…. for entertainment, for enlightenment, for curiosity and it has been rewarding. What does all this have in common? It is a sort of documentation of your world and the world around you.
It is whatever interests you. It is being a documentarian.
And so, since I have found such efforts so pleasing and rewarding, I thought maybe others could be inspired to be their own Documentarian. So I thought let's start a blog (and vlog).
So here it is The Documentarian blog. I will, through material that interest me, try and inspire others to explore their world and in doing so document it.
My first effort will be to put some sense to a project I have been working on with my best and oldest friend, Al Willner. It is called Press On: The Eddie Willner Story