I’ve noticed something about myself when I’m looking through a camera. I’m alert. Motivated. Engaged. The mental chatter gets quiet.
I’ve noticed something else, too: if I go looking for beauty, I never have to look very far before it appears.
Beauty has become a complicated subject in contemporary art. Some artists distrust it, and I understand that. But my message remains unapologetically on its side. Beauty gives me pleasure, ease, relaxation and joy. If there is a thrust to my photography, perhaps it is simply this: beauty is (almost) everywhere when you cultivate the eyes to see it.
I am just trying to inject more beauty into the world.
I started looking through cameras very young, lugging around my father’s Kodak when I was barely big enough to hold it. I wasn’t so much interested in recording what was in front of me as I was fascinated by what happened to the world when I looked at it through a lens. My father eventually bought me a camera of my own, and I was off to the races.
For a long time, though, I never imagined myself as an artist.
Artists were other people. My best friend since college is a painter. I admired what she could do with a brush, while I remained impressively capable of getting more paint on myself than on its intended target. I thought of myself as a problem solver, not an artist.
Photography turned out to be the place where the problem-solver and the creative could meet. A camera is technology. Photography is full of technical problems demanding to be solved. But all that technology is available to be put in service of something entirely different: imagination, emotion, curiosity, shape, beauty.
Fifteen years ago, I anguished about whether to sign up for a workshop in Badlands National Park with photographer Tony Sweet and his partner, Susan Milestone. They were real artists. What business did I have standing beside them in Plein air?
But I loved Tony's work. They are happy to teach. So I went.
And then I went back.
For about a decade, I returned to the Badlands with Tony and Susan year after year. Each time I headed home toward Missouri, I was already thinking about when I could return to my beloved Badlands.
Somewhere along the way, almost without noticing, I stopped wondering whether I had any right to be out there lugging my tripod and my gear around.
I began to think of myself as a photographer.
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For nine years, I have been sharing journeys with a German Shepherd dog named Lucky. In one photograph from the Badlands, he stands looking into the distance, part scout and part protector.
Not long afterward, he became critically ill and nearly died. I can’t look at that photograph now without seeing something I couldn’t have seen when I made it: that for all the companionship we give one another, there are some things even those we love have to face alone.
Fortunately, Lucky made it through and is still here.
And our household has recently expanded to include Ilford, a three-year-old doodle who is so new to the family that he has not yet sat for his official portrait.
Home is Columbia, Missouri. I don’t have to travel a thousand miles to find something worth looking at. The River Road, just south of town, is one of the places I return to when I want to wander, scout, and see what the familiar landscape might be doing differently today.
River Road
My own house has been subjected to the same scrutiny—including infrared, which can make even home look like someplace I’ve never been.
During the busiest years of my professional life, photography often had to survive on whatever scraps of time and energy I could give it. Since retiring, I’ve finally been able to give it the attention it had been asking of me all along.
And there is nearly always one photograph occupying far too much of that attention. Usually it’s the one I’m working on right now. I’ll become convinced that I love it more than anything else I’ve made.
Right now that photo is when I took earlier this year of the Sheldon church ruins outside of Charleston, South Carolina.
Sheldon Church Ruins #1
Apparently, though, becoming comfortable calling myself a photographer didn’t entirely finalize in my brain the question of whether I was an artist.
So you can imagine where my head went when I learned that having a photograph shown at the Daum meant I needed to write an artist's statement.
I’m told—and let’s not inquire too closely into how I know this—that “I hate writing about myself” is something of a cliché on dating websites. Cliché or not, I sympathize. Asking me to write about myself is an excellent way to make me suddenly certain I had nothing to say.
Asking me to write about myself as an artist! The old anxiety about whether I was really enough of a photographer came on back, now accompanied by the considerably more alarming question of whether I was entitled to call myself, in public, an artist.
For some reason, instead of responding by writing something safe and dignified, I went in the opposite direction. I wrote something intimate and weird.
And then I worked on it. And worked on it. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being embarrassed by it and started to like it.
Now that it exists, for some equally mysterious reason, I think it belongs here.
Then again, I’m 72 years old and retired. What the hell have I got to lose?
My life is richer for all of this.
And if you’ve made it all the way down here, thank you for spending some of your life with me, looking at the some of the things I love to look at.
Charlene Adkins
August 2026
Iris from Diane's Garden