This month the literary magazine The Main Street Rag published an essay I’d been working on for a while that meant a lot to me. It’s about meeting my husband, Stan, back in the 1980s when we both worked at a newspaper in San Diego—about Cartier-Bresson and the “decisive moment”—but mostly, about what it’s been like to be married to a professional photographer for over 30 years, watching him watch the world through his viewfinder, one frame at a time.

The essay is not available online, so if you want to read it, you have to get a hold of the Spring 2023 issue of the magazine, with its glorious cover image of a broken-down pickup. To buy a copy, click here. Or you can email me.

In the meantime, here are a few excerpts from the story:

… He drove a used Pinto station wagon because his dad had always loved Fords, which everyone thought was funny because the family name was Honda. Since I drove a Honda … I joked to people we were destined to be together …

… Once we started going out, Stan told me that all photographers hate reporters. They hate the way we try to tell them what kind of pictures to shoot to illustrate a story, and they especially hate the way we introduce them as “my photographer.” As in, “This is my photographer, Stan Honda” …

… When I looked at pictures, or when I looked at the world, I focused on people’s faces or other signs of human life … Not Stan. He saw geometry, the elegant symphony of lines, shapes, and shadows …

… As we began to spend more and more time together, going to museums and galleries and just hanging out, I overcame my fear of sounding stupid and simply asked him, “What do you see?” I was never sorry when I did because photographers, by occupation and temperament, see things the rest of us don’t see …

… Even now, after so many years together, I’ve never stopped asking Stan why he likes a picture or what makes it great or some other variation of “What do you see?”… I’ve also come to realize that when we walk down the street or sit in a restaurant or even read the paper, we don’t see the same thing …