A midlife crisis is usually treated as a joke.
The cliché involves an aging man, a sports car, and a vague attempt to outrun time.
In my case it turned out to be something quite different, and unexpectedly productive.
When people talk about men going through a midlife crisis, the tone is often faintly mocking. We picture older men, too fat and too bald to look good in a Porsche, and we laugh about it.
In reality, a midlife crisis can be remarkably productive, especially in photography. Many serious photographers spent decades experimenting before finding their central theme in their fifties or even later. Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson are only two examples among many who became highly productive and focused in their fifties.
At its core, a midlife crisis grows out of the awareness that life is not everlasting. We all know this from the beginning, but when we are young it feels distant enough to ignore. None of us knows when we will die, yet as we grow older we attend more funerals of our peers, and the question of what our legacy might be becomes harder to avoid.
The Birthday Party for Strangers
For me, it began around the age of fifty. I remember organizing my fiftieth birthday party and wanting it to be completely different from all the parties that had come before. That decision had much to do with the realization that turning fifty was certainly not the end of my life, even if the emotional undertone sometimes suggested otherwise.
I felt somewhat depressed as well, and that led me to make an unusual choice. I did not invite any of the friends who had attended my many previous birthday celebrations. Instead, I pinned a note on the wall of the nearest bar, inviting anyone who had never met me to come for a drink at my place.
I did not expect many people. The bar was around the corner from my home in Amsterdam and was mostly visited by tourists. As it turned out, those were exactly the people who showed up, delighted to discover a place where drinks were served for free.
It was a completely new experience. At one point a Welshman was singing songs in a language I could not understand. There were people from African countries I had barely heard of. The atmosphere was cheerful and generously lubricated with alcohol.
At the beginning of the evening, very few people knew that I was the one celebrating my fiftieth birthday. As the party progressed, however, many guests began asking who I was and what my role in the event might be. They must have suspected that the man constantly opening new bottles of wine, beer and vodka was also the man whose birthday it was.
Soon the obvious questions followed. Where are you from? What do you do for a living?
The first question was easy. The second was much harder.
At that time I was not doing much that could be called a conventional profession. I ran a virtual museum of erotic art on the internet, and the last company I had worked for had recently gone bankrupt. So I began telling people about the many jobs I had held: photographer, magazine editor, illustrator, designer and, to top it off, a published author.
That is a long answer to repeat to every visitor, and I have always disliked telling the same story again and again. As the evening progressed and everyone became more inebriated, I started looking for a single thread running through my career.
Eventually I realized that nearly every project I had ever worked on was connected, directly or indirectly, to eroticism.
In the end I discovered the shortest possible answer. Whenever a new guest asked what I did, I simply told them that I was a dirty old man.
The effect was immediate. The remark rarely invited follow-up questions. People laughed, tapped me on the shoulder, toasted to my health, and moved on.
Looking for a Thread
In the weeks that followed, I began looking at my career from a different perspective. It was not so much a retrospective view. Instead, I found myself looking forward in a way that had been unfamiliar to me before.
I decided to combine my interests in psychology, photography and sexuality by starting a project that would document different forms of sexuality through photographic portraits.
I never felt comfortable photographing sexual acts themselves. As a portrait photographer by nature, that was difficult for me. When people asked why, I would jokingly reply that I simply had trouble photographing moving subjects. I liked to add that I might have become a great sports or press photographer if I had ever learned how to photograph movement properly.
Of course, the truth was more complicated than that.
I had never fully understood my own complex sexuality, and because of this I had never managed to sustain a relationship that lasted longer than ten years.
Today it is widely recognized that bisexual people like myself often face additional challenges when trying to build stable relationships. Yet my sexuality was not my greatest difficulty. I also struggled with intimacy, and somehow I convinced myself that the project I was about to begin might help me find answers.
Now, at seventy, I cannot say that the project ever gave me the answers I was looking for, but somewhere along the way a great deal of the pressure quietly disappeared.