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Matinee: George Lambert
16 December 2017
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 218th in our series of Saturday matinees today: George Lambert .
In three and a half minutes you'll meet George Lambert but you won't be able to size him up right away.
George works at Syracuse University as a custodian. George is also a Syracuse student studying fashion photography.
As George himself says, "Photography takes me to a different life." One George, two lives.
Photography gets his mind off his problems, focusing his energy on the task in front of him. Loading the film, mounting the camera on a tripod, setting up the lights, directing the talent, evaluating the captures, editing the images.
'Photography takes me to a different life.'
The video shows him load film in a medium format Mamiya and, just as carefully, polishing the floor of a hallway.
He laughs when he tells his story. He was in a motorcycle accident, he says, and was in a comma for six months. Funny.
He lost a third of his memory, doctors told him. Not so funny. "It took me a lot to come back," he admits.
Still, he couldn't finish high school. His mind just wasn't up to it.
As the years went by, though, he says his mind got "better and better." He learned to study and develop the skills he needed "to do what I couldn't do before."
Rather than replaying in his mind what he could not do, George concentrated on improving. The clip shows him at the computer, looking over his thumbnails, his hand shaking on the mouse. He isn't thinking about the shakes but the thumbnails.
Some days he's on and some days he's off, he says. His goal? A modest one. Finish school and do something with his education.
"I'm a survivor," he smiles.