The Quest for Authenticity…
I was thinking about how to capture the essence of a person. What do you need to know in order to feel like you know someone? The trading card metaphor was a start, but batting averages don’t convey real people. Numbers don’t tell us much about human beings. I was interested in what’s in a person’s heart.
Meanwhile I kept taking photographs, investing in better equipment and honing the process of capturing an authentic portrait. Authenticity became my watchword. I was interested in authentic people who were not afraid to show up and be real.
I wanted to tell help people find and then tell their stories. And I was learning that the process itself, the very act of spending an intimate moment with a person, talking to them, taking their photograph, was almost talismanic. Being seen and heard was helping people to know themselves. The process of being seen (first by me and then by themselves) is transformative and illuminating.
Then Along Came Michele…
Around this time, through a crazy series of events, I met Michele Turner. She was a veteran creative and graphic designer, we were the same age, both divorced parents of girls and we had uncanny synergy. I knew instantly that we had to work together and I began sharing some of my ideas including a new one I had that I called a Story Mosaic.
The concept was simple. I would build a composite image of a person made up of several photographs. Each photo would include some text on it. I sort of imagined it as a stained glass window that, viewed together, would tell a sort of story. But that could also be viewed individually to reveal more details.
Each ‘pane’ of the window would convey a small part of that person’s story and could be posted in various places on the web - blogs, websites, social media - with each linking out to the others so that a person could explore as much as they wanted.
Ideally, these images would come up in Google searches so that a prospective employer would find them, thus augmenting the resume and the LinkedIn profile with a more objective, journalistic content that would present the whole person.
Michele loved the idea. She encouraged me to do more of these story mosaics and we began to brainstorm together. She had been working on some ideas of her own that jibed with this concept of being seen, being known. She believed in the power of story.
We decided to work together. We didn’t know what we were, or have a clear vision yet as to what we were doing, but we both felt strongly that we had something here. So we became business partners...