I wrote this essay years ago, before I had a best selling photography book. I guess I'll need to put something else here. Until then ...
In an attempt at something productive, our lackadaisical hero slaps together a hodge podge of his collected images he's made over the last few years in the desperate hope that he's doing something useful.
In John Steinbeck's Winter of Our Discontent the protagonist, Ethan Hawley, gets a glimpse of his life to be when his new wife reorganizes his precious collection of books according to Size and Color. I confess here that my galleries are, in fact, so ordered. No lofty content holds them together, but rather a homogony of appearance. For what that's worth.
In the still watches of the night, my desperate fear is that I'm acting like a retired dentist living out some I-should-have-been-a-photojournalist mid-life crisis. Invariably this leads to several discouraging hours of holding negative sheets up to the light box and rooting around in boxes of terrible prints to try and figure out what the hell I've been doing all these years. This all comes from some need to justify all the expense I've put into equipment and all the time and harassment I've put my family and friends through and all the hours I've spent in a dark room loading film. I have to look at whatever eclectic body of work I've produced and ask myself "Am I going anywhere tangible?" If I'm not, I need to get rid of all this gear and stop play-acting like I'm a photographer.Looking Back Coldly
I have specific fears and failings as a photographer, most of which I'm painfully aware of, some of which I'm doing something about, but all of which become more and more blatantly obvious as the days pass. Which is not to say that things are not improving -- indeed they are -- if I look back now at some of my more pathetic early prints (which I won't even link to) I realize that I've gotten a lot better in a lot of ways. That said, however, technical skill is learnable and only part of the process -- the least important. The world is filled with photographers who are techincally proficient but creatively mediocre. (My grandfather was one of them -- exposures as precise and sharp as an engineer could produce but utterly and completely vacant of any emotion, all carefully labeled and mounted in archival media like a detailed parts catalogue of family vacations.) I'm continually stumbling across the web pages of sixteen year old girls living squalid and lamentably dull lives in Perth Amboy who's snapshots with a crappy $200 digital are filled with enough life and vitality and creativity to make me consider heaving my camera bag into the Schuylkill and not waiting to watch the splash.
Gestalt: You Should Always Have Your Portfolio Ready
My portfolio's a wreck. There are a lot of things that I should have together that I don't, a lot of images that I don't have good prints of. Perhaps most shamefully, there are a lot of things I should have together that I can't even find the negatives for. Here's my attempt at packing it all together -- a working digital portfolio. The images on these pages are some of the ones I'm most pleased with. I think the oldest is the image of the firemen extinguishing the panel van in gallery three, which I believe was taken December of 1999.
The Truth of the Matter
What we're left with at the end -- what meaning it may have -- I'm not sure.
You have too many cameras and you don't take enough photographs.
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I hate it when people go on about their cameras, but since I find that I often click that button myself out of curiosity, here you have it. I used to have a bunch of cameras. In August of 2002 I got a Leica D100 SLR and haven't shot a frame of film since, so I won't bother listing what analog junk I still have lying about.
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