Or maybe I dream I am smaller because that is what a photojournalist should be. Stay small so the subject is big, huge, in-your-face-can’t-look-away massive.
But… I am no longer a photojournalist. Or so I claim.
When I retired from my 25-year sentence as a professor, chair and trustee at a university, I retired from photojournalism. I opened my heart to a newer work from older days. And though my heart was open, photojournalism did not leave those chambers. Am I sentenced to an eternity as a shooter? A hack? As a take-the-assignment-because-it puts-bread-on-the-table kind of guy with a camera?
If I have turned my back on a profession I loved so dearly that I would have done it for free, then who am I?
We all live through the four seasons of each year and the innumerable seasons of our lives. So, with trembling and dismay, I enter this next season.
I leave soon for Italy to my beloved Orvieto. There, I own Casa Carlo, our apartment named after my nono, Andrea Federico (Carlo) Bisio who started this outlandish Bisio clan. Not more than fifty meters from Casa Carlo will be the home I just purchased. Nuovo Inizio a di Casa Therese (Fresh Start at the home of Therese… named after my bride)
At Nuovo Inizio I will offer digital photography classes to Wounded Warriors beginning in the Spring 2025, who will stay at the house for a week and learn photography so that they may earn livings as photographers. Or not. They will come to Orvieto, free, through my nonprofit, blueheART STUDIOS FOUNDATION.
Then I will launch Peace Week. And after that, I will hold a week-long gathering called PAL, where two Israeli and two Palestinian teachers will come to Nuovo Inizio and learn digital photography. With no talk of religion or politics and a whole lot of fun, food and fotographia, I will then send them home so they can teach their students this wonderful, nonverbal communication of making visual statements. What will all these projects change?
They will change me.
Stay tuned. My website is near ready to launch.
I leave you with an image I made (with my iPhone) that will be the logo foto for Peace Week. It is an olive tree near a museum in Cortona. And yes, I made it under a Tuscan sun.
