Work as an autobiography

And what I'm working on next.

My mom, brother, and me circa 1986.

It’s important to me that everything I work on is, in some way, an autobiography. My most satisfying work has always connected to what I care about most, but also to what I’ve lived through. Passion gives the work energy, and experience gives it perspective. Together they set me up to make something lasting.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to cameras as a way to notice things. My photos and videos became receipts that I noticed something new, or at least something differently.

This drove my work at Vimeo.

I’m twenty years older now and I find myself in a new golden age of noticing: raising kids. Every year contains a thousand firsts, each somehow both typical and marvelous. You watch a person come into being, meeting everything and everyone with superhuman generosity, and you can’t help but wonder about your own beginning. This is the double act of parenthood that makes it so profound: we watch simple childhoods branch into complexity while tracing ourselves back to our origins. Each act of noticing them becomes an attempt to know yourself.

When my mom died eight years ago, my habit of noticing had a different impulse. The few albums we have of her, though mostly ordinary, now carry the weight of everything that’s gone. I study them closely, searching for traces … the way her eyes glinted when she laughed, the smile that never faded when she was surrounded by her kids … each becoming a kind of evidence. A reminder that she was here, that we came from her, that the texture of her life still echoes through ours.

Now I notice her in others. And in myself.

Through her I’ve realized that collecting and organizing memories can be much more than an attempt to reconstruct a simpler past that never was. It can be a way of knowing someone in order to understand ourselves and each other. It’s one way I’ve learned who I am and how I stay mindful of where I come from.

I’ve come to believe there is real magic in helping others do the same. So I’ve decided to focus on this for a while and I’ve joined Legacybox as a Partner to do it.

Our company operates a 120,000-square-foot digitalization facility in Tennessee where we convert more than 11 million items a year—film reels, tapes, slides, and photos—and preserve them digitally. Much of this analog media is fragile and often the only existent record of a life lived.

In an age of content slop, I’m fascinated to work with media that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and doesn’t require an algorithm to be appreciated.

Legacybox combines physical craft and digital innovation in a way that feels deeply right to me. It also fulfills my early hope for the Internet: to make experiences that bring people closer, not farther apart.

My goal here is to help families notice the traces and let those memories live on.