Seventy-Five: Connectivity Through the Ages

Two lifelong friends, photographer Terry Wild, and poet/writer Lori Joseph, have collaborated to produce a brief, but beautiful and insightful reflection on aging in a society that Joseph claims “…has experienced a deep decline in empathy….”

The point of departure for Seventy-Five: Connectivity Through the Ages is Wild’s recent seventy-fifth birthday, a day he says was a revelation. “It crept up on me,” he writes. “The desire to be ‘out and about’ was diminishing. ‘In and around’ was manageable.”

Inspired by his seventy-fifth birthday, Wild took one photo a day for seventy-five days, focusing on “the randomness of daily life and how we take the ordinary for granted,” and sent them to Joseph, who used them as inspiration for her accompanying prose.

Wild, an award-winning photographer with numerous accolades, has captured the kind of images that stay with readers. Joseph writes in her introduction to Seventy-Five: Connectivity Through the Ages that she hopes the images and words work to “provoke and stimulate (readers)…to look at the ordinary and to feel something.” And indeed, paired with her spare but eloquent poems, Wild’s photographs succeed in achieving moments of reflection, much in the same way that Edward Steichen’s book The Family of Man uses stunning photographs of humanity in the context of every-day life next to sublime quotes taken from the world’s literature.

There is a sense that within the pages of Seventy-Five: Connectivity Through the Ages, is the love of two friends, both coping with age and eventual loss, but still buoyed by their limitless capacity to continue creating as long as they can.

Seventy-Five: Connectivity Through the Ages was published in 2022 by J2B Publishing, LLC, and is available from Amazon >>

—Stephen Newton