Today I have my friend and NY photographer Susan Rosenberg Jones on the show. Her latest project titled Second Time Around, has been getting quite a bit of attention lately, I wanted to approach it from a different angle by also inviting the subject of that project, her husband Joel.
Susan Rosenberg Jones ~ Bio
Susan Rosenberg Jones was born and raised in Boston, and moved to New York City in 1976. In 1978, she began working at a lab in Manhattan as a custom black and white printer. A few years later, she started working as a photo researcher for a stock photo agency, and began a long career in stock photography, licensing images to various publishing and advertising clients.
In 2008, Susan’s husband passed away after a long illness. She felt the need to photograph seriously again and purchased her first digital camera. Feeling rusty, she took a course at ICP just to re-connect with the camera controls and practice with editing software. She worked on various portrait projects, and in 2011 began work on Building 1, a series about her neighbors in the apartment complex in Tribeca where she’d lived since 1984.
In 2012 she married her second husband, Joel. As a tangent to her photographs of her neighbors, she began shooting in her own home, and Joel was a willing subject. He was a bit skittish at first but he became more comfortable as she kept photographing. From this practice, Susan’s body of work, titled Second Time Around emerged.
Susan explores her feelings about growing older, family and community connections, through photography.
Visit her website: http://www.susanrosenbergjones.com/
The Project ~ Second Time Around
After having been married for 32 years my husband passed away in 2008, after a long illness. Once widowed, I experienced the confusing and mixed feelings of grief: guilt, loneliness, regrets, indelible memories of loving glances, hugs, and laughs. In 2009 I decided to try online dating because I wanted to meet a man for an occasional movie or dinner date.
The second man I met online was Joel, and we felt a bond right away. Soon after, I closed my account on JDate. We married in January of 2012 in a lovely ceremony at home. I hadn’t expected to fall in love, but I did. To my surprise and delight, I found that I could deeply love this wonderful man who entered my life, while holding dear the memories of my first husband.
Having been in a long-term marriage, I came to this new relationship with the tools in place to be a good wife. We quickly fell into the routine and ease of being a stable married couple, except that we were newlyweds in our 60's. There is humor in that. For one thing, our bodies are not supple and streamlined the way they were when we were young. We both come with a lot of baggage, and at our ages, it’s no big deal, nothing to get excited about. We’ve both seen a lot, done a lot, and have higher thresholds for idiosyncratic behavior than in our 20’s and 30’s.
In this series, Second Time Around, I delight in observing my new husband as he goes about living day to day. We both know that life is short, and perhaps because of our new found love and comfort, can journey through this life with a certain enthusiasm. We feel secure, yet we know we’re lucky.
