At age 50, I started following the rock band, Bleachers, around the country.
Not merely because I was a fan. Or because I was chasing nostalgia. I was chasing a question.
Somewhere along the line, youth became something I spoke about in the past tense. We treat wonder, recklessness, possibility, and freedom as if they belong to a vanished version of ourselves. We call it growing up.
I wanted to know if that was true.
So I bought concert tickets. I slept in hostels. I carried a notebook. I shot film. I stood in line with teenagers and twenty-somethings waiting for the doors to open. I interviewed them about their dreams, their fears, and the futures they imagined for themselves. I began keeping a journal the way I had as a child.
The strange thing was that I wasn't documenting them.
I was documenting the distance between who I had become and who I once imagined I might be. Following Bleachers became a framework for something larger: an investigation into vitality itself. The photographs move between ecstatic crowds, quiet hotel rooms, portraits of young fans, handwritten notes, and the lonely spaces that exist between destinations. Together they form a visual diary about longing: not for youth, but for possibility.
Again and again, the same questions surfaced:
When do dreams become memories? What happens to wonder? Is freedom something we lose, or something we stop practicing?
The young people I met were standing at the beginning of their stories. I was standing in the middle of mine. Yet the closer I looked, the less different we seemed. We were all searching for belonging. We were all trying to imagine a future. We were all trying to hold onto something that felt alive.
This project is not about growing younger.
It is about refusing the idea that becoming ends.
Through photographs, journals, conversations, and miles of American road, I Want to Find Tomorrow asks whether youth is an age, or whether it is the courage to remain unfinished.
Website
amysackaphotography.com
Collaborating Artist
Amy Sacka
