What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane

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, but is part of your family legacy also this event that, no matter what time period, is still really, really messed up but also what your grandfather went through, he left home he was in eighth grade so that means he was probably 13 or 14 years old, so being a 13- or 14-year-old suddenly being a nomad whereas most people at the age of 13 or 14 are, I don’t know –– well, I mean, nowadays they’re teasing each other on Instagram but, in general, for what I remember 13, 14, it’s like, okay, you’re getting into the cool music, you’re hoping that your parents will take you to a show, you’re anticipating getting your driver’s license and trying to figure out where you fit into the social circle of your junior high into high school. Yeah. I mean, some of us were still eating mud at 13, let’s be clear, and he’s out there making a difference. And certainly that level of grit and determination, there is no doubt that it is deeply ingrained in our family.Share on X I was just talking to my mother about it this week and none of us were really allowed to quit, if that makes any sense. And so, of course, as messed up as that was, my grandfather made a commitment as a pacifist. Because of it, had real problems when world wars came along and when Korea and Vietnam came along and raised his children to believe in peace and love, and, yes, there is a spiritual level to it but he passed that on because he wanted it to end with him. And, for the most part, it did end with him. So he wanted what his stepfather had done and whatever patterns led to his mother inviting that person into her home because I sometimes think about nowadays how sometimes if someone’s marrying into a family with someone that already has kids, they’ll make sure that the children are okay with that. And that’s a part of the process now. So whatever pattern that was, he was like, “Okay, this ends now,” and then he established this new pattern, this new multigenerational pattern which is that grit that he had to turn to to get this business started when he was just a teenager. Yeah. He and my grandmother were married for 64 years and good, bad, or indifferent, no one ever heard them argue publicly. We know that they did because there are accounts of them having words behind closed doors but that was part of how they raised my mother and her three sisters and everyone was expected to respect each other and that translated into the business because both my grandparents and my parents ran their businesses out of their home and so talking about connecting the legacy of kindness and respect with each other, we used to joke all the time, we all lived on the top floor, that was our apartment. You walk down the stairs and that was the business. And so it came from that legacy of perseverance and kindness and respect. It came down from the apartment on the second floor to the business on the first floor for both my grandparents and my parents. So your grandfather started the business and I’m assuming that means that he did photography for his entire life. My mother was born in the 40s and my grandmother was helping him run that business so a strong lineage of strong women on top of it, and so she handled the money, she handled the business side of it, and he handled the photography and the processing of the film. And then did he pass it along to your mother then or was there –– Yeah, actually, my aunts took it over. So my mom is the oldest, and because she relocated to Indiana and my other aunts were younger, my grandfather didn’t retire until he was old enough, and so they were actually the ones that ended up taking it over and then my mom and I came to Indiana. I see. So, are your aunts, are they still in Georgia then or do they run the business out of Georgia? Yeah, they ran the business for a long, long time out of Georgia. In fact, up until when my grandmother passed away, and then my two aunts decided that they were going to sell the big home where the business was and my youngest aunt continued on to do fine art photography for quite some time but they are now both retired and enjoying the spoils that they deserve. I see. So then the mantle was somehow passed along to you. Is this indicative of a tight knit family where you got to see how your aunts were doing it, how they were running the business, and, of course, how photography works? Sure, we have a very tight knit family, especially when it comes to this photography. They’re constantly, when I launched a new website last year, everybody in the family was sending me emails to tell me their opinion on what was going on, but just the mentorship that comes from having people behind you. My stepfather, unfortunately, got taken out of the business before I could get fully trained and so my mom was there, my grandparents were there, they were still alive, and there was just a group of people supporting me. And it’s not that there hasn’t been bumps in the roads, there certainly have, but each bump that I had, there were people propping me up. We kind of joke in the family, it’s the difference between jumping from the springboard in the swimming pool to jumping from the platform. So that’s what happens in a family business is that you shouldn’t have to redo the steps that your parents and grandparents did. You stand on the shoulders of the people that fought so that you could have this opportunity. It’s fully your business at this point, right? It is fully my business at this point, but it has changed a lot. So I took it over when I was, oh, 23 years old, I think was when I ended up taking it over because my stepfather had a stroke and he was unable to continue on and I was still growing up. I got married, I had children, I got divorced, just so many roads of trying to get from here to there so that I might carry that mantle on for the family. ...