Though he's best known for his music career, singer-songwriter Julian Lennon is expanding his creative renown this winter with a new book of photography titled Life's Fragile Moments.
Julian tells Q104.3 New York's Out of the Box with Jonathan Clarke that his photography career came out of a combination of boredom, fascination and lack of sleep during long-haul flights in the pre-Internet era.
He notes that when he first began flying, a passenger's only options to pass the time were to watch the in-flight movie, read or sleep. Julian has never been able to sleep on planes, so during sleeping hours, he passed the time by observing the world outside his window.
"While everybody else was sleeping, I'd stare out the window," he says. "It could be morning, it could be evening or it could be just starlight. I would always be fascinated by the beauty of the world around us. Also, it was a moment of either complete reflection, where you thought about your life and where you're headed and what's going to happen or you actually thought about nothing at all and you just felt at ease and at peace."
Julian was enrapt by the beauty of clouds. Wanting to preserve those momentary vistas, he learned how to capture and develop photographs.
"They happen once, for a fraction of a second," he said of the clouds. "As is our life — everything that we've seen and everything that surrounds us only happens once and only for a split second. I started capturing those moments in the sky. It was only later, when I started doing trips for the White Feather Foundation, my charity, that I started to carry a camera along with me literally as a journal of my trip."
It was often only when he returned home and developed his photos that he realized that they told a story.
Julian began publishing his photos where possible. Nowadays, he shares them on social media. He says he's always been amazed by the feedback he's received.
"I thought that was a nice way of, in many respects, telling the truth from the other side of the world," he said. "I never took pictures with an agenda as such, it was just about capturing time, place, people and what they were doing. I found that fascinating. It seems that other people do too, obviously."
Life's Fragile Moments is available now. Go here for more information.
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Watch Julian Lennon's new music video for his song "I Should Have Known":