Parenting & Family Quote by John Sexton

Nostalgia is doing real labor here, but Sexton refuses to let it stay sentimental. By calling his turn to photography a "natural extension", he frames art not as reinvention but as continuity: the camera becomes a tool for returning, not escaping. The line quietly demystifies creative origin stories. Instead of the lightning-bolt myth, we get a chain of influences and lived geography, where childhood familiarity and adult craft meet.

The nod to "Ansel and others" is doing double duty. On the surface it reads like respectful lineage-building - Sexton placing himself in the gravitational field of Ansel Adams and the West Coast fine-print tradition. Underneath, it signals a specific ethic: attention, patience, the belief that landscape can be read like a text if you learn its grammar. Sexton is not just visiting locations; he's revisiting a way of seeing that Adams popularized, then testing it against his own memory.

The phrase "these places that I knew as a kid" carries the subtext of recovery and calibration. Childhood landscapes are both intensely vivid and notoriously unreliable; photographing them is a way of negotiating between what the place is and what it has become in your head. Context matters: Sexton is an educator as well as a photographer, and the sentence sounds like teaching - a model of artistic development grounded in observation, influence, and return. It suggests that the creative path isn't always forward. Sometimes it's a disciplined second look at what was there first.