What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane

Action's Antidotes

Family legacy means different things to different people. For some, it’s a big part of who they are, with strong traditions and high expectations. For others, it’s something they’re still trying to figure out. But how do you build something new while honoring where you came from? In this episode, I have Leslie Lane, the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13. Photography runs in her family, and she’s been able to take that legacy and shape it into something of her own. In our conversation, Leslie shares what it was like growing up in a photography family, how she found her own style, and what it means to her to carry that legacy forward while doing things her way. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about a topic that we’ve yet to really cover in this particular podcast, and that is the idea of a family legacy. I know some people have a stronger family legacy than others. For some people, it really looms large and there’s a lot of expectations, and, for others, it’s maybe even lacking direction too much. But my guest today, Lesle Lane, is the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13 but she comes from a family that has a legacy of photography and she’s been able to take their business and kind of move it in a direction that puts her own mark on it. --- Lesle, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure. Definitely. So, tell us first about how photography is part of your family legacy. I sure will. So, my grandfather actually started the business. He came into the photographic industry because when he was an eighth grader, his father tried to kill him with a garden hoe and so he ran away from home. You’ve got the shocked look on your face. It’s true. He ran away from home and they didn’t have Child Protective Services and so he ended up getting in with traveling salespeople, nomadic people, that’s what they did, and one of the things that they did was teach him how to be a photographer. And so he would go from town to town taking pictures and then going back several weeks later to deliver the pictures and, finally, came upon my grandmother, who he ended up marrying, though he was hired to shoot her engagement portrait so that was quite scandalous. And then they settled, started their portrait photography business in Columbus, Georgia. And then my mother and father divorced where we moved to Indiana together, she married my stepfather and then I took over his version of the photography studio, which was corporate and commercial work. It’s just shocking to hear someone trying to kill their own son with a garden hoe because people will oftentimes joke about it and they’re like, funny, like, “Oh, I could kill you,” or something like that, but like this was a literal attempt to end his own son’s life. Yes, and, actually, I misspoke, it was a stepfather, but still, the man that was married to his mother, and it was during the Depression times, things were not good, there was no work, there was no money. It doesn’t excuse it at all but he had no choice. And so my grandfather, he survived and ended up running a very successful business and dying a multimillionaire. He made something amazing of himself after leaving home in the eighth grade. That is a legacy. That is something you can grab on to. Great father, great grandfather, and I’m blessed to have known him. One of the things that I’ve done personally and I know a lot of other people have talked about recently and it gets a little bit spiritual sometimes is this idea of multigenerational patterns and how they affect anyone’s life going forward. And so you have this family legacy of photography, which I definitely want to talk about as well as that’s your business,