Teaching Photography: Notes Assembled

Neoteny – The End

75 When I was leaving my full-time teaching job last fall, I was speaking with John Levine on the telephone. John is a psychiatrist, who teaches at Harvard Medical School. He was in the first photography class I taught and became interested in the relationship between photographic, musical and emotional tone. I told John I had a strange feeling; although 65 and retiring, part of me still doesn’t know ‘what I want to be when I grow up.’ ‘That’s neoteny,’ John said. He went on to explain that neoteny is a biological term which is used metaphorically to describe adults who, while functioning at a mature level, retain and utilize traits from earlier stages of development: curiosity; imagination; playfulness; a zest for learning new things; and a connection with childhood feelings and fantasies. Many older artists are in that situation, he said. ‘It’s a positive adaptation. It’s also part of how they got to be artists in the first place.’§§§§§ I send a prayer of gratitude for the experience of standing in awe at the sight of birds flying past a bare tree against the winter sky. NEOTENY THE END ...