Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Sexton

The romance of photography often gets stapled to the moment of capture: the decisive click, the artist as omniscient hunter. Sexton drags the myth back into the dim, chemical middle of it all, where images are made slowly, imperfectly, by touch and judgment. The darkroom here isn’t nostalgia; it’s a proving ground. By emphasizing “advanced age” alongside “still get excited,” he frames mastery not as a finished state but as a sustained vulnerability to outcome. The thrill survives because the risk survives.

The key move is the repeated “struggled.” Sexton refuses the polite legend that great photographers glide. He makes struggle democratic (“like we all do”), collapsing the distance between an admired elder and the rest of us. That’s intent with a pedagogue’s instincts: to give students permission to fail without reading failure as disqualification. The subtext is almost moral: craft is not a ladder you climb past difficulty; it’s a relationship you keep renewing with difficulty.

Context matters. Sexton, long associated with the Ansel Adams tradition and its reverence for printmaking discipline, is speaking from inside a culture that treats the darkroom as both laboratory and chapel. His admiration isn’t for genius as effortless originality, but for a temperament: someone who keeps showing up, keeps wrestling the negative, and still “beaming” when the print finally sings. Success is framed as earned, fleeting, and therefore electric.