What Experience Teaches Us About Culture

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For the past few years, I’ve occasionally found myself thinking about age in ways that were not always positive. Like many people approaching their sixties, it is easy to look at a culture that often celebrates youth and wonder whether experience still carries the same value it once did. Yet recently, while reflecting on the work I am doing with this website, I began to see things differently. What I once viewed as a disadvantage may actually be one of the greatest assets I bring to it: perspective.

That perspective comes with time. At fifty-nine, I have lived through several distinct eras of media, culture, and technology. I remember a world shaped by television networks, newspapers, magazines, and film long before the internet placed a constant stream of information and images in front of us. Cultural moments traveled differently then. A television appearance, a magazine cover, or a single photograph could capture the public imagination in ways that feel almost unimaginable today.

Over the decades, I have watched enormous changes unfold—not only in media, but in technology, politics, and the broader cultural climate. The way people communicate, how information spreads, and how public figures are perceived have all evolved dramatically. Experiencing those changes firsthand offers a kind of long view that is difficult to gain otherwise. It allows a person to compare how different generations interpret the world around them.

Photography has been part of that journey for most of my life. I became interested in it at the age of fifteen, but the foundation was laid much earlier. When I was growing up, during the era when figures like Farrah Fawcett were cultural icons, I often watched my father working in his darkroom developing prints. He also took photographs frequently when I was a child, so cameras and film were simply part of the environment around me. By the time I reached my teenage years, photography felt less like something new and more like something that had quietly become part of who I was.

Spending more than four decades behind a camera shapes the way a person sees the world. Photography trains the eye to notice details many people overlook: the timing of a gesture, the subtle expression on a face, the balance of light and shadow, or the fleeting moment when composition and emotion align. Over time, those habits of observation extend beyond photography itself and begin to influence how one interprets media, culture, and even historical change.

My upbringing also instilled another value that has stayed with me: respect for others. My parents taught me to treat people the way I would want to be treated. At the time, that felt like a normal part of everyday life. Looking back now, it seems like a value that has faded in some areas of public discourse. That lesson has shaped how I approach writing about public figures. Even though I never knew Farrah Fawcett personally, I believe the people whose lives we write about deserve to be treated with a basic level of dignity and respect.

That outlook naturally influences how I approach this website. While the site centers on the life and cultural legacy of Farrah Fawcett, my interest has gradually expanded into something broader: how media, imagery, and cultural moments shape the way we remember different periods of history. Images may serve as entry points, but they often lead to larger reflections on the societies that produced them.

Living through multiple decades of cultural change provides a vantage point that is difficult to replicate. It makes it possible to compare how people once experienced media and public life with how those experiences have evolved in the digital age. It also reminds us that each era often understands itself differently while it is unfolding than it does in retrospect.

For many years, I thought of age primarily as something to resist. Recently, however, I have begun to see it differently. Experience brings context. It allows us to connect moments across time and recognize patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. In that sense, the perspective that comes with age can become an advantage rather than a limitation.

If this website succeeds in offering anything meaningful, I hope it will be that perspective. By combining a lifetime of looking through a camera with decades of watching culture, technology, and public discourse evolve, I hope to share observations that illuminate not only the images of the past but the broader cultural moments they represent.
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Photo Credit: William Kare, © 1979, used for educational and commentary purposes.