Transparency
Day 103
I wish every human life be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir
I’m an innately private individual. I also know the heavy personal weight of a secret. How it holds you down and blocks the powerful depths of your true self from seeing daylight. So my personal resolution for 2010 is for a more transparent life. It’s also my wish for the world.
Almost half my life ago, I told my mother my biggest secret – that I’m gay. For my first 23 years, I had carried a dark, seemingly immovable rock of shame inside myself. Yet, with one brief moment of transparency, it dissolved. I felt light and unencumbered, and the now fine particles of my former secret slid effortlessly from my being. Almost instantly though, habit reconnected me to fear of judgement. I looked at my mother and nervously asked, “So…what are you thinking?” She gave me a look of unconditional love. “I’m thinking that I finally know my son.”
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It All Starts Today
Day 1
A possibility was born the day you were born and it will live as long as you live.
Marcus Solero
It All Starts Today.
Those four simple words have taken me on quite a journey. It’s the name of an extraordinary, low budget 1999 French film by Bertrand Tavernier, about a schoolteacher in a small French town economically devastated by the closure of coal mines that employed most of the residents. The children this man teaches bear the consequences of their parents misfortune and the film documents his daily struggle, against incredible odds, to bring some light and beauty into their lives.
The climax of It All Starts Today is a scene of profound beauty. Using old plastic soda bottles, water and food coloring, the children create an art installation that, for one evening, shifts the entire energy of the town. This act of using items otherwise discarded to bring color and light into a dark space is breathtakingly moving. This isn’t a Hollywood film. There’s no standing on desks, no massive redemptive moment that changes the town for the better. It’s a gritty, often harrowing look into the effects of poverty on communities. Yet it remains one of the single most inspiring films I have ever seen.
As I write this, unemployment in my chosen home state of California is pushing 15 percent. Myself and many of my closest friends have been dramatically affected by the current economy. Much of what I gained during the past six years working in Los Angeles exists now only in memory. And I am acutely aware that there are too many in America (and beyond) who are suffering far more terribly, barely surviving. My heart is filled with compassion for their pain.
Yet, today I feel an incredible sense of optimism. I’ve been threatening to launch a blog for years. And for me, there has never been a better time than now to begin. It costs nothing but time to write. Thanks to digital cameras, photography is no longer a rich person’s career. And the internet is a free canvas to create and share work upon.
Lewis Likes It brings my two greatest passions – writing and photography – together for the first time. And my aim with it is simple – to bring a little more beauty into the world. Not so much the models and celebrities I’ve been photographing in LA these past six years. Like It All Starts Today, I want to share the kind of beauty that comes from the simplest of ideas and most unusual of places.
I’m having a very small group of friends over tonight to celebrate Day One of Lewis Likes It. We’re going to crack open a few bottles of cheap prosecco and toast the somewhat miraculous birth of my new baby in the midst of less than ideal circumstances. These are people who believe in me, who believe in Lewis Likes It, and who have supported me during its early development. It’s a far cry from the celebrity filled launch party for 10, a photography collection I released with much fanfare back in 2007. That was an incredibly fun night. And those were different times.
There’ll be big launches again in the future, and I truly believe there’s many good times ahead for us all. For now, I hope you’ll dive in and enjoy this journey with me as we celebrate both the moments and things in life that bring us closer to each other and the beauty of this world that makes life so worth experiencing. And as I move forward with this next phase of my life, I carry the message of that small film with me.
It All Starts Today.
