A Life through the Lens

NATHAN FARB SAYS HE HAS ONLY recently figured out how to finish the multimedia “vision quest project” that he’s been working on for years. (More on that later.) He is in his studio, in Jay, on a blazing warm October morning, the stone walls papered with his massive color prints that you feel like you can disappear into, trying to organize and catalog the negatives, transparencies, Cibachromes, prints and videos that he has accumulated over 55 years of work. Thousands of digital images stare back from the big computer screen. It’s a daunting and enormous task, and he has fewer resources of energy and attention to bring to it than he once did. “I wish I could work more hours a day,” he says.

For the past several months the greater part of his attention has been taken up by living alone during a pandemic, since his partner of 22 years, the film critic Kathleen Carroll, broke her hip and had to remain in rehab in Lake Placid, quarantined much of the time. He’s suffered a series of ailments, doctor’s visits, related diminishments.

But in the midst of it all he has been ruminating on his past and how he came to be where he finds himself now, at 80. “I’m trying to make sense of my career,” he