Bringing the World to Those Who Can’t Go

Photography has been an animating force in the life of Joel Gewirtz since, as he puts it, “I was a kid.”

Since then, the 87-year-old has taken tens of thousands of photos, applying an artistic eye to capturing scenes of nature, art, people, places and things, such as historically significant objects and locales, as well as daily life in his native New York City, on Marco Island and elsewhere, spanning the U.S. and the more than 50 countries and six continents he’s visited over five decades.

Today the retiree and longtime Marco resident is sharing the fruits of his avocation with the world via a self-created website, www.joels60moments.com, containing 44,000 select photos organized into 700-plus galleries.

As stated in the press release announcing the website, “Each gallery features photos taken in a single city, offering visitors an immersive experience highlighting the local culture, people, and everyday life in hundreds of destinations across the globe.”

Gewirtz is making the photos available to the public free of charge, as a way to enrich lives by sharing the “beauty, complexity and humanity” he’s observed and chronicled through the camera lens.

“Basically what I have is travel and my photography, and I love both of them,” he explained. “I've decided that I'm good enough that I want people to see my photography. I want people who are sitting in a nursing home or at home, and they can't go out and travel and walk down the streets with me, or see something of where they've been, where they're going, or where they would like to have gone. It's my last goal in life, so to speak. I've had a great life. I have no other adventures to plan. I travel, I take pictures, I want them out there for people to see.”

It was a conversation he had with a fellow island resident that sparked the website’s creation.

“I had a friend here whose mother lived in Atlanta and she said, ‘Can we send her pictures from Atlanta?’” This was before I had the web page. We worked it out and her mother just adored it because she couldn’t go wherever she wanted to go anymore because she was older and infirm. Those are the people I really want to get to. That's very important to me. I think that'd be a great audience and I think they'd appreciate it.”

He has no interest in enriching himself through the website, only in deriving a sense of satisfaction.

“I'm not trying to make any money out of this; not a penny,” he said. “That would take away from me the ability to get them out there. If I'm saying, ‘Oh, I'm going to make money on this,’ then it's a whole different ball game and I'm not interested in that game.”

Gewirtz’s travels have taken him to Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America, where he’s partaken of the cultures of such disparate nations as Morocco, Cambodia and Vietnam, China and Japan, Israel, Singapore, Iceland and Italy, France, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru, among others. His most recent trip saw him journey to the Netherlands and Belgium in late March and early April.

Where subject matter is concerned, his photos aren’t simply relegated to what the typical tourist might shoot, in part, because he utilizes a travel company that offers clients a truly immersive experience.

“I go there and of course, I take some of the pictures of the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe,” said Gewirtz. “I walk down the streets and take pictures of people. I show how people live in different countries, rather than just all of the cute things to see. I go to all these different places and just take as many pictures as I like that please my eye.”

During a trip to Hanoi in North Vietnam last November, he toured the Cu Chi Tunnel System, which was used by the Viet Cong.

“We met with three Viet Cong officers and chatted about the war and lots of things like that,” he said. “I've done a lot of that because the group I go with, we always have dinner with a local person and if we have time, we go to a village and we cook and we do things. I’ve picked stuff out in the fields like tea leaves and corn. We're there, so we live there. So taking all these pictures is showing people, ‘Hey, look at all these people out here and how they're living and such.’”

However, Gewirtz has no interest in showing the darker side of life in the places he travels.

“I don't take pictures of people living in the streets, or people who have sorrow like cripples and things, because we don't need to share that, and it's not very uplifting,” he explained.

Marco became home for him, his late wife of 57 years, Judy, and their three young children, in 1982. Gewirtz spent 35 years as a certified public accountant before closing his business, Joel Gewirtz CPA, in 2016 to care for his wife, who suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s Disease.

His photos have been featured in an assortment of publications, including the Marco Island Chamber of Commerce, local and national tourist guides, and commercial brochures. He’s also been the subject of exhibitions at the Marco Island Art League and the Marco Island Library.

In 2009, he published a Marco-focused coffee table book containing 110 photos depicting the island’s landscapes and scenes of life in the community.

Robust and active, the octogenarian intends to continue traveling frequently as long as his health permits. In late May, he journeyed to Europe for four weeks, visiting Berlin, Dresden, cruising the Elbe River, and more, then on to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Slovakia and the trip’s final destination, Vienna, Austria.

Some of the photos he takes there will join the website’s ever-expanding collection.

“By the end of the year, it'll have 55,000 pictures because there are some in-house that I haven't gotten around to adding,” said Gewirtz. “It's a busy life, but it's a great life. I just want to share my pictures. Lots of people have seen them and they like them. So I figured why don't I get them out to them, especially.”