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Visual History:
Abby Aguirre
Abby Aguirre is a freelance writer and editor. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, W, and other places. Before going freelance, Aguirre spent six years at The New York Times, on the foreign desk, in the opinion department, and as a features editor at T: The New York Times Magazine. When not writing portraits of Whisper’s artists for our blog, The Hourglass, she is working on a novel.
Aguirre's Mom in Baja, 1969
This picture was taken a decade before I was born, but it captures my upbringing very well. My mom always wants to be near the ocean and she is always recording things, both impulses I inherited from her. Also, you can see her swimmer's arms—she swam competitively when she was young, and I spent a good deal of my childhood trying to keep up with her on very long, open-ocean swims.
Aguirre at a Beach Boys Concert, 1983
This is me at a Beach Boys concert with my older brother, the singer-songwriter Gary Jules, in the foreground. My other two siblings and I benefited greatly from growing up with a musician in the household. It was considered far more important that we know which Beatle wrote which Beatles song, who each of the Sex Pistols were, and that the drummer of The Who was Keith Moon than it was to know, say, who the Secretary of State was. For this I am eternally grateful.
Photograph of Joan Didion, 1999
This photograph was not taken in 1999, but I believe 1999 was the year that I discovered "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album." It's impossible to overstate what these books have meant to me. They are subtle but penetrating, feminine but macho, completely original and completely Californian.
"The New West" by Robert Adams, 2001
This book was published in 1974, but I first saw it as a senior in college. I had long been drawn to the work of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, but Adams opened my eyes in a different way. His photographs of tract homes and urban sprawl in Colorado are both beautiful and polemical. They aren't celebratory or purely documentary—they seem to be saying very nuanced things—and they showed me that photography could be every bit as complicated as writing.