My Year in Photos
Rather than adding one more tired Ten Best list to your inbox, I'm bidding adieu to 2025 with some visual pizazz.
It took me a while to decide on what to focus on in this last post of 2025. There’s so much I want to write about, but none of it feels right for a final sayonara to the year.
Ten Best lists are an easy fallback, of course, but the closest I could come to one was a list called Ten Things I Almost Wrote About. Moreover, I’m determined to post weekly on my Substack, and at latest count 2026 has 52 weeks. So it can all keep.
Instead, I thought I’d send something more eye-popping and fun to your beleaguered inbox. Namely, photos. I love taking photos. I’m a visual person, and snapping pics on my iPhone wherever I happen to be is my way to pleasurably navigate the world as I trespass through it.1 I’m also lazy, but let’s not go there.
According to my iPhone stats, I took over 4,000 photos this past year. In deciding which ones to select, I scrolled through them all quickly and didn’t overthink it. I created a new Best of 2025 folder and saved about 30 images there. From that I did a second round of paring down.
So, ladies and gentlemen (drumroll, please) here are the Ten Best some special photos that best captured the year for me. Not necessarily the prettiest or most artful, or even my favorites. Just ones that leapt out at me and, for whatever reason, brought back a particularly noteworthy memory.
Walks to the bay
Marjorie and I split our time between NYC and our house in Springs, NY, which is just less than a mile from a short stretch of land overlooking the bay. Almost every day we’re out there we go for a walk to the water as the evening light is fading. And no matter how many times we’ve gone there it always feels like I’m seeing its beauty for the first time. Needless to say, I’ve taken a gazillion pics.
On the other end of the beauty spectrum
It’s hard to think of anything uglier and more horrifying that to watch the country I love plunge headlong into unbridled fascism in the course of one year. My hope for 2026 is that enough people wake the fuck up, Dems grow some balls and we vote like our lives depend on it. Because they do!
My favorite form of self-medication.
The Clock
There were a lot of movies that stood out to me this year: Train Dreams, Hamnet and Sentimental Value come immediately to mind. But my most memorable movie experience by far came on a rare visit to MOMA and wandering into a daily showing of The Clock. We were pressed for time and thought we’d only stay for a short while to get the idea. After 57 riveting minutes, we had to tear ourselves away. I think about time a lot, but this take on it has stayed with me ever since.
For those who haven’t heard of The Clock, here’s the MOMA description:
“Encapsulating 100 years of moving-image history, Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) is a 24-hour montage composed from thousands of film and television clips depicting clocks and other references to time. James Bond checks his watch at 12:20 a.m.; Meryl Streep turns off an alarm clock at 6:30 a.m.; a pocket watch ticks at 11:53 a.m. as the Titanic departs. With each clip synchronized to the local time, The Clock collapses the fictional time presented on screen with the actual time of each passing minute. The work is both a cinematic tour-de-force and a functioning timepiece.”
My favorite list of the year
The New York Times came out with a list of their Favorite Movies of the 2000’s, and two of my films were selected: 51 Birch Street and The Kids Grow Up, as well as a film I produced (with filmmaker Jon Foy) Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.
The year’s best example of cognitive dissonance
Seeing the lovely and charming Irish actress Jessie Buckley at a Q&A immediately after having reduced the packed audience to puddles of tears with her remarkably intense performance in Hamnet was disconcerting, to say the least. That who she seems to be in real life is so 180 degrees the opposite of her character in the film is an even greater testament to her extraordinary performance. And makes me glad I’m a documentary filmmaker. I’m just too in awe of actors.
The colors of Oaxaca
Last year at this time we took a family trip to Mexico, splitting our week between Oaxaca and the coast. The colors of Oaxaca are absolutely stunning, and these two photos are my favorite examples.
The world premiere of “My Omaha” at Slamdance
There’s nothing exceptional at all about this photo, you see ones like this on social media all the time. But for favorite memories, this is right up there at the top of the list. That’s Yours Truly with shiner (long story!) on the left posing with the films’ main protagonist Leo Louis and filmmaker Nick Beaulieu. I couldn’t be prouder of producing the film with Nick, and seeing it go on to rare success in this sucky time for documentary distribution. After a rousing festival premiere at Slamdance, the film showed in 72 U.S. cinemas in October via the IRL Movie Club before breaking box office records at FilmStreams in Omaha. The theatrical release will be limited, but there are already several bookings in early 2026 thanks to Jim Browne and Argot Pictures.
My two ladies
In the late summer Sarasota heat, we took a detour to the beach after a memorial service for my step-mother Kitty.2 It’s not like I haven’t taken countless photos of my wife and daughter, but I love the contrast here of the natural light with the blue clouds, as well as the expression on their faces. It reminds me of an all-time favorite photo (below) of the two of them when Lucy was just a peanut (talk about time passing!).
We were going through some of my dad’s stuff while down there and I came across a fascinating photo of him as a young tyke I’d never seen before, and it also reminded me of the one of young Lucy. They were very close, and is it just wishful thinking that I see a strong resemblance?
Another Paris landmark anniversary
When I asked Marj where she’d like to go for our 40th anniversary she didn’t hesitate for a moment before saying Paris. I was a little surprised as we’d gone there for our 30th. It was while there a certain anonymous love letter fell out of our used Pariswalks travel book and a mystery I’ve been trying to solve for the last 10 years was born. “Bien sûr,” I replied, cleverly thinking I could shoot an ending to the film I’ve been making about it at the same time. Little did I know that once there I’d realize we were actually shooting the beginning.
I launch a Substack newsletter of my own
Back in 1996 I started a blog I called The D-Word, which I kept up for 4 years while making my film Home Page. It was insanity. Luckily, it evolved into an online community for documentary professionals that’s thriving to this day. 30 years later, here I am again, blogging while attempting to make Betty & Henri (& Me). This might be insanity, as well, but what it might evolve into in 2026 and beyond is something I can’t wait to see.
Thanks for reading this to the very end, and wishing all my sophisticated, discerning and fabulous-looking subscribers the very best in the coming year!
I love hearing from you, and try to answer anything you care to share. So feel free to shower me with “likes” and…
For me, photography is more than an hobby and less than a profession. A few years ago I got the bug to put up a website to sell my photos, but I’ve been distracted by other things lately (not least of which has been my Substack).
So memorable in my films 51 Birch Street and The Kids Grow Up.