With Photography?
First published in The Study of Light, on Substack, on March 17, 2026
When I’m not a photographer, I am a community mentor. It’s a side gig I started when Covid hit, at the time when fresh photographs were less essential. One to one time with at-risk youth was an ongoing need that couldn’t be paused for the pandemic. Some of the work was remote, the rest of it was done with masks and open car windows and outdoor activities. It was a good job, and I was grateful for it, and since I’m still connected to a kid from that long ago-seeming time, I continue to do it, with just that one kid.
Recently this employer held a staff training about LOVE, and how LOVE impacts and influences our work. Mark, my supervisor, led off with the questions:
~ What is appropriate, or not appropriate, to address with clients in regard to love?
~ Can we talk about love without talking about love?
And he suggested we discuss ways to make connections to neuroscience, attachment theory, and child development theory.
We refer to and study John Welwood’s book Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships.
It was a GREAT topic to explore, because, IMO, what else is there?! What is driving mentors and therapists and teachers and caregivers (the list goes on), if not love? I believe that most of the people in “the helping occupations” are paying forward a debt and a gift. They are giving something back. They harbor lofty ideals, then get down into the mud of messy human lives, and do their best to help others. And improved lives, most of the time, come slowly. Not in two hours, as in a feel-good film. Sometimes it takes years, sometimes we see nothing at all while we work. We plant seeds and water saplings and hope for apples and sometimes even pick those apples. But you never plant the tree for the apple. You do it for love. You do it out of love.
I had a conversation with Bill on his wedding day. Bill was the groom. He had been a baker, and then he became a teacher of yoga and meditation. On that day he also became a husband and stepfather.
He said: “You can be a baker or a teacher or a photographer or a mechanic or a CEO or a soldier (this list goes on too), these are all just mediums, ways we deliver the best service and final product. And that is love.”
Own a restaurant? Love. Direct a team? Love. Trim the hedges? Love. A hedge trimmer doesn’t just cut branches. A hedge trimmer cares for creation, fosters beauty, interacts with a property owner. All these opportunities to love.
What else is there? Love is not limited to “the helping professions.” It’s what you do, no matter what you do. There’s an anecdote about the executioner who sharpens his blade to make this dying faster and less painful. Yes, even that.
I had another conversation, back when I was a twenty-something, in Germany, with my Munich Hilton co-workers. I was a exchange student then, interning in a field I did not want to work in, but in a very exciting time and place. Photography was my hobby. One night, as we were sitting in the staff lounge in the staff house, carrying on, I shared my opinion with the group that LOVE, as a starting place, as a motivator, as a modus operandi, makes photography better. The work of a “loving” photographer, over the long haul, will stand out.
Photo credit: Richard Hanger
Well, that went over like Kumbaya at a séance. These German/Italian/English/Irish/Turkish/French coworkers shot that idea down. It wasn’t practical, and there was evidence enough that people excelled at any craft while tearing others down.
Decades later, I am far more sure of this than I was on that night.
