It feels like a month ago, but it was just last week that I was attending the annual New Jersey Association of School Librarians conference in Atlantic City. This has fast become one of my favorite conventions to attend, I love having the opportunity to meet and get to know so many school librarians and educators, as well as other authors writing work for younger readers.
Unfortunately this year I was not able to stay for the full duration. My father-in-law of over twenty years had recently been battling a terminal illness, and it had been feeling for a few weeks like we were nearing the end. On Monday I decided to head out of Atlantic City early to be home for my family, and I am glad that I did as we got the news Tuesday morning that he had passed.
His name was Marc Best, and among many other things, he was a lifelong aspiring artist. His medium was photography, and the whole time I knew him he was continually shooting images, always improving his techniques and developing his skills, and, something that all artists that I know will likely relate to, doing the often-times frustrating work of trying to figure out different ways to reach an audience and share what he’d made.
The first time I met him, in 2002, my then-girlfriend, now-wife and I took the train out to the Hamptons where he was showing work in some venue as part of some sort of collective. For years afterwards he would invariably be working with this or that group of other aspiring “amateur” photographers. One of his friends from one of these groups shot the photos of my wedding. He would spend time on the weekends in darkrooms and studios, making prints and getting them lovingly framed. He would take pictures constantly. At some point in the late 2010’s, when he was likely in his sixties, he went off on a solo trip to the Philippines and New Zealand just to shoot. He was gone for a few weeks, I think we all thought he was crazy at the time, but I imagine that was probably one of the trips of his lifetime.
As we’ve been thinking about him this week, we’ve realized that his preference was often to take pictures of broken down, dilapidated things and make them aesthetically appealing. The photo at the top of this post, “Greasy Kitchen”, is a very large photograph that he developed and framed one day and handed to me and my wife as a random gift. I don’t know whose apartment he’d been in where he took the photo, but we had this hanging on our walls in our different homes for years and years. We took it out this weekend to display during his shiva.
I don’t love that we use the word “amateur” to describe an artist when they aren’t reliably generating income from the work they create. It sounds less-than. The road to becoming a “professional” is an endless series of trying and failing and trying again, and failing again. I know well myself, this life is largely made up of steps-forward followed by disappointments and never-quite-getting-theres, followed by yet one more step-forward after that. It doesn’t end and you never arrive. What I admire about my father-in-law, and what I admire and relate to about any practicing artist, is the keeping on going. Because it’s not possible to stop. Marc had that. And among the things he left us, was a body of work that told us something about him. What he saw, what he thought was beautiful, what he felt compelled to bring into this world. I think that’s a wonderful legacy and I’m so glad to have it. I will miss him greatly.
My condolences to you and your family. Thank you for sharing this! It was very touching. Your father-in-law sounds like he was a talented man with a good heart.