Sibling Rivalry
Okay, you want to talk about eerie? I’ve got this brother who’s fifteen years older than me. He left home about the time I graduated from toddlertude, and he’s never lived closer than half a continent away. So we grew up almost completely independently.
Despite that, I find myself following in his footsteps in some ways: a quiet, introspective bent; a liberal leaning; a passion for the printed word and creative writing; a mild interest in photography; and an interest in Buddhist thought. And I don’t think you can attribute those to parental influence, because I don’t think any of those traits were actively cultivated by our folks.
So that’s the background. Now for the story. This morning I got an all-too-rare email from my brother, with a pointer to some photos he recently took for a photography class with his new Nikon D100. I went and took a look at them and was absolutely flabbergasted. Here they are.
Now, compare those with the following two photographs.
Pretty similar, huh? Not quite identical, but the thought process behind each was, if not identical, then amazingly close.
Yes, the punch line is that I took that second set of photos for classes I was taking at art school back in 2004. The ship was for a study of Boston in my Digital Photography final project, and the tree was for a book I made in Graphic Design 3. To my knowledge, my brother had never seen either of my photos before. His photos were taken three years later, on the other side of the planet.
And this isn’t a case of having thousands of photos to choose from. My brother has only posted eight photos from class, and I haven’t taken all that many, myself. Sure, there’s such a thing as synchronicity, but this goes well beyond that.
It really makes me wonder about the degree to which particular creative thought and direction might be influenced by genetics. I’m at a loss to explain the commonality in any other way, since he and I have had completely disparate life experiences. We’ve never even seen each other’s photos before! It’s just incredibly surreal, and I thought it was an experience that just had to be shared. I’ll be wondering about that one for a long time to come.
Oh, and if you want some real synchronicity, consider this: My tree photo was taken in the Arnold Arboretum. Our class had been assigned the task of making a guidebook to that particular park.
Many, many years ago, my brother once lived in Boston, and in fact was married in a ceremony that was held… on the grounds of the Arnold Arboretum.