Four postage stamps from Iran dated 1914 (1332 in the Hijri calendar) and commemorating the coronation of Ahmad Shah Qajar. Two, with blue and reddish-brown ornamental frames, show the shah's crown within a wreath. Two, with brown and blue ornamental frames and a silver base, use a design, based on ancient Persian reliefs, of an enthroned ruler on a platform supported by a row of figures.

Collecting: A World of My Own

Books—and their covers—were one pathway to art and much else, but I also loved objects, puzzles, and patterns; the shapes of small things, their colors and fine details. Counting, classifying, and arranging them all was serious business. I collected stuff, anything really: stamps and coins, baseball cards and Kennedy cards, rocks and shells, even a butterfly I netted alive whose pointless agony I have never forgotten. Some of this was just hoarding, as a glance at any space I quickly fill—or my bottomless email inbox—can confirm. But, it was also a child mastering a miniature realm to make sense of the boundless and unruly world before him.

Against a background of bare trees on a wintry April day in 1966, I am strapped into a large seat on a camel with two other boys of my age. I was 9 years oldA brochure titled, 'The Exciting World of Dinosaurs' from the New York World's Fair 1964-65. The cover is dominated by a brontosaurus. Within a subtropical landscape of grassland, small palms, and a pond, it shows several other dinosaurs, including a stegosaurus, triceratops, ankylosaurus, two duck-billed dinosaurs, and, at the corner, the head of a tyrannosaurus rex with an open mouth and menancing teeth. The dinosaurs have the heavy, plodding shapes common in imagery of that era, unlike the more nimble figures we see in today's reconstructions. It is from the Sinclair Dinoland where the Sinclair Oil Company displayed huge figures like these.

The Space Age instilled a simple faith in science that the acrid fumes of our incinerators and the fallout shelters in our hallways could not dispel. I was lucky to live in a city where the American Museum of Natural History, the Hayden Planetarium and, in our maligned borough, the Bronx Zoo and New York Botanical Garden let its residents explore every habitat and voyage to the moon and planets. For us New Yorkers, our city was the capital of the world as well. (You know that of course.) We had the United Nations and hosted a World's Fair in 1964-5. Our last in 1939, as my parents remembered, had been less opportune. Now, new countries arose every day from the wreckage of empires. The Statue of Liberty reminded us that immigrants, like my grandparents, had flocked here from everywhere. Our lively streets and neighborhoods, with all their color, sound, and pungent smells of cooking, made clear that many went no further. Why would they? That much, at least, was a pride we shared.

At the height of the Cold War, a child could not be insulated for long from frightening bulletins and headlines. In a Catholic and staunchly anti-Communist household, Castro, Mao, and the gruff, if grandfatherly, Khrushchev were a trio of bogey-men who, I feared, any billowing curtain might conceal. A decade that began with crises in the Congo, Berlin, and Cuba was ending with the Cultural Revolution in China and carnage in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Diplomacy at the UN, protests in the streets, and a mosaic of ethnic communities made every coup and conflict resonate in New York.

Collecting things gave me little pieces of this world and tools to comprehend it. Full of history and culture, postage stamps were snapshots of one-time colonies and hopes that independence brought, of Cold War rivalries played out with orbiting satellites and Olympic medals, of folklore and customs, monuments and natural wonders. Colorful scallop shells or the glinting crystals and rainbow flecks of a chunk of granite stood in for the tide pools and rocky wildernesses I saw in books or dioramas. The Edmund Scientific Catalog was a wonder to page through. It advertised instruments to extend my vision and samples of fossils or minerals from around the globe. I was glad Santa Claus liked it too.

I'm wearing suspenders, sitting on Santa Claus's lap, and talking to him in this department store photograph, probably taken when I was about 2 or 3 years old.

Collections required study, organization, and design. Albums for coins or stamps were all set to be filled, but shells had to be identified, labeled, and laid out neatly, with an eye to colors, shapes, and sizes. With my mom's help, I mounted them in carefully matched boxes: scallops, almost flat, fit in those for nylon stockings; cockles or moon shells needed roomier shirt boxes; for rocks, shoe boxes would do. What I couldn't collect, I tracked and tallied: the license plates of the fifty states or the ups and downs in the charts of songs and bands in the era of the Beatles and Beach Boys. Through urban glare, haze, and sooty windows, I sought out bits of sky between buildings and trees to trace the movements of planets and, over the seasons, constellations.

One common denominator was a pleasure in noticing details and patterns. What made a shell or leaf one type and not another? How could I tell where a stamp was from or distinguish unknown languages? I did not get rich from the time spent pondering whether the latest 1960 penny might have the less common "small date", but I did sharpen my skills. To no one's surprise, I became near-sighted very early. I learned, though, that seeing was more than acing an eye chart. For these hobbies, it meant knowledge and discrimination. The most obvious contrasts might not matter at all, while subtle details could be decisive.

I relished the visual puzzles in Highlights magazines. In some, I had to find hidden figures, a toad or rabbit sketched in the branches of a tree. In others, I had to distinguish two nearly identical drawings by spotting an extra line, an unobtrusive object, or one more flower or feather. The crowded scenes in "What's Wrong?" were a visual Twilight Zone of bizarre or creepy intrusions into the picture my mind expected me to see; it was an early lesson in transgression and the ways rules are most brightly visible when they are broken. Those challenges made me look forward to visiting the dentist. We climbed the steep and narrow staircase to Dr. Ozick's office where his waiting room had a child-sized table and stools and plenty of those magazines. My mom scheduled her appointments with mine, giving me more time for studious play.

More perversely, my glee carried over to the dentist's chair. No needles were needed. Pain was numbed as Dr. Ozick drew out the compelling drama of bible stories. I never tired of the favorites in his playlist: Abraham haggling with God over Sodom and Gomorrah; Pharaoh's stubbornness and the plagues of Egypt; Moses enduring the murmurings of the Israelites; and the bleak misfortunes of Job. His vivid descriptions of Job's camels and herds seized my imagination, even if I didn't think he got a fair shake. The weightier dilemmas of suffering, trust, and divine justice were over the head of a schoolboy, but the stories were told to be remembered. Dr. Ozick spoke the parts with comically exaggerated impressions of hesitation, impatience, and complaint, and the bare essentials to stage a scene before your eyes.

An angel flies in from the left. His gesture shows he is addressing Abraham, a man with gray hair and a gray beard, and wearing a green cloak over a white garment. Abraham turns towards him while he raises his long knife in his right hand. With his left hand, he pulls at the hair of Isaac. The boy crouches on top of an altar, his open hands outstretched, as if in supplication. He looks towards the viewer with terror marked by his wide, deeply shadowed eyes.

Above all, Abraham's unflinching plea to God stood out. I knew him from Catholic readings of the Sacrifice of Isaac. Whatever its profound import, a father's submissive willingness to slay his much-loved son had not endeared him to this boy. This was different. It began tentatively. They could have been bargaining over a belt in a marketplace, as Dr. Ozick characterized it. But, the suspense grew with the drumbeat of each appeal, as Abraham dared to persist, questioning with conviction this formidable God who could zap him in an instant. It was the right story for the moment: everywhere one looked, people were rising up, realizing their strength, confronting the powerful, and calling for justice. And, it suggested that twenty or ten people, perhaps even one, could make a difference.

These performances taught another kind of lesson as well. The back and forth of a repetitive dialogue anchored every tale Dr. Ozick told. Bit by bit, each round ratcheted up the tension. I readied myself for small variations or a surprising twist with the same keenness I had applied to visual puzzles minutes earlier. Like the melodies I was beginning to play on a piano, each episode had its crescendo of repetition, and its changing pace with expectant pauses and points of emphasis. As if in the expert song of some ancient bard, the rhythms and cadences that Dr. Ozick captured so well infused these stories with meanings deadened by the humdrum drone of readings at Sunday Mass. What a story meant was bound up with how it was written, structured, and told.

My father, holding his movie camera and wearing a brown coat and cap, bends towards me as I stand, bundled up for winter, in front of a mound of snow taller than I was at four years old. The piles of snow created by the shoveling of the sidewalk reach to the base of the window of a parked car.At the Bronx Zoo, a rhinoceros bends his head and drinks from a small artificial pond in an outdoor enclosure.

Hearing, finding, and seeing patterns, organizing and displaying collections, and looking through the eyepiece of a child's microscope or telescope were preparing me to put the world in the frame of a photograph. My dad worked, as a bookkeeper, for photographic firms, first Peerless Camera Store, then Berkey Photo. Discounts on equipment, film, and processing made it less of a luxury for us. He had a 16mm movie camera, blinding lights for indoor family gatherings, a projector with its unwieldy reels, and a rickety movie screen. With no fanfare or fuss, he was the family photographer. We watched home movies and thumbed through envelopes of new Kodak prints. Family members weren't shy about what they liked and didn't.

No formal lessons were needed. My technical knowledge remains minimal. Now and then, I google SLR to remind myself what exactly that is. But, I was learning about design, light, and color, what to include, and what to leave out. When I could, I took my time to size up the light and shadows, find the right angle and distance, line things up, frame my shot, and check the borders and corners, obeying instinctively the maxim my mom always loved, "Anything worth doing is worth doing well." Soon I would discover the best trick of all: choosing subjects crafted by artists who must have had a mother like mine.

An oblique view of a detail of the Crucifixion scene on the Siena Cathedral pulpit. We see Jesus's head and torso with the deep wound in his side. One man, profiled against the dark shadow of Jesus's body, stares intently at Jesus's slumped face. At the edge of the photo, St. John's head is bent with an expression of grief. To the right of Christ, a balding, bearded man with sharp features and wavy hair over his ears raises a rod with a sponge towards Jesus: his face is almost demonic. To the right, three of the Jewish elders or priests cringe or fall backwards. One points towards Jesus. They are recognizable by their long curly beards and fringed shawls.

Copyright: James D'Emilio, who is the author of all texts and the author or owner of photographs, unless another source is acknowledged; last revised, May 2, 2025