Coda
In the winter of 2017, after my father, the artist Irwin Touster passed away at the age of 95, I began the process of documenting the huge and mostly unseen collection of work that he had produced in his lifetime. Thousands of works of art, including paintings up to 10 feet long, and sculptures weighing hundreds of pounds were photographed and catalogued, and in so doing the connections between the different periods of his work, and his history as an artist, began to emerge.
Almost three years later, in March of 2020, while still in the process of working on my dad’s site, the Covid Pandemic exploded and life as we knew it came to a shocking halt. All of my upcoming commercial assignments, and the many personal photo projects that I had been working on stopped dead in their tracks. The Pandemic was difficult for all of us on so many levels, but it's one bright spot was the luxury it gave to me of uninterrupted time, allowing me to bring to fruition certain projects that I had not been able to complete.
Working on, and bringing to completion my father’s site brought up a number of issues for me; confronting my own aging process, the desire to find meaning and purpose in the way that I had lived my life, and the role that photography had played in shaping the person who I am today. I was saddened that my father had never been able to see his finished web-site, and to appreciate the totality of his work when it was finally compiled together. I did not want to share that same fate.
And so began a three year journey of working on an autobiographical website of my own, with the hope of finding similar connections and realizations about my own art and history that I had about my fathers. I waded through and organized my work, scanning and rephotographing thousands of negatives, slides, prints, publications, documents, mementos, and archival family photographs, in an attempt to make sense and connections out of the massive amount of photographic work that I had produced during my lifetime. I also began writing about the images, and the feelings and experiences that I encountered while taking them.
The process of compiling and writing about the work was cathartic for me, and a number of realizations came into focus; how certain themes and subject matter that I was photographically drawn to remained a constant throughout my life; my continuing interest in documenting change over time; a need to choose projects where the subjects share a sense of community, and by photographing them I also become part of that community; an all encompassing empathy and appreciation towards my subject matter; and a deep love for photography as a narrative and visual medium. The process also allowed me to assemble in chronological order seemingly random, individual photographs that when put together made clear the longview of both my own, and the subject I was focusing on's history. This was especially apparent to me while sequencing the Kathy's Family photographs in chronological order, which reinforced one of the things I truly love about photography; how it amplifies the visual details of our lives, and so well documents the passage of time. As for the existential issues and questions that were brought up for me while working on my father’s site? I did come to a number of realizations about them, but for at least the moment, I will keep those to myself.
I feel extremely grateful and blessed that the Covid Pandemic allowed me the gift of time; giving me the opportunity to take this eye-opening journey of assembling my life’s work, to find meaning in what I had accomplished, and to tell the story, if only just for myself, of a life framed by photography.
-Joshua Touster 2022