It’s never too late in life to let passion take the wheel.
Julian Orenstein, 66, has been a pediatric emergency room doctor for over three decades, but he was always interested in photography.
“I always found my way to having a camera,” he said. “In college, as it turns out, there was a dark room in the dorm I was living in. I was playing with (photography), but it was never serious because immigrants’ kids’ directive is to make money, don’t do anything crazy, don’t do anything where you might not make it.”
His mom’s side of the family immigrated to the United States at the turn of the century, but his dad, a Holocaust survivor, immigrated to the U.S., making Orenstein a first-generation immigrant.
Now that he is “close to retirement age,” he chose to “make good on a desire to do something I’ve always wanted to do”: pursue photography.
“When we moved here last year,” Orenstein said, “I met a couple other artists in town, and one of them said ‘Marblehead is the most photographed place in America – or at least on the East Coast.’ And he said, ‘Don’t get cute.’”
This conversation led Orenstein to utilize his skills behind the camera to showcase new perspectives of well-known areas in Marblehead, like Old Burial Hill and the Marblehead Lighthouse.
“I started getting up at dawn – I’ve never been an early morning person – and it’s a totally different place in the morning. Some days are foggy; some days are already bright. I’ve been really enjoying that,” he said. “It’s also fun to get up early and see it from a different perspective. So I just kept going out more and more.
“What I have kind of attached to is: The greatest photographs have not all been taken yet. I thought, OK, what is a great photograph to be taken here? I’ve gone to some of the more familiar landmarks and tried to look at it and capture it in a way that’s familiar but new in terms of all the pictures people are seeing and let someone say, ‘Yeah, this is why I love this place.’”
His gallery, “Love Letter to Marblehead,” will be open from March 28-April 15 at The Willie Shaker Gallery, 70 Washington St., and 10% of sales will benefit local nonprofits Making Ends Meet and Marblehead Counseling Center. There will also be an opening reception held March 28 from 4-7 p.m.
