When I began my rather spectacular crack-up three or four years ago, one of the first things I did as I talked to myself, walked through the woods at night, and fell into what Joseph Campbell calls a dark and disconnected place, was call B&H Photo in New York. I told a man named Paul (I assume he was a member of the Orthodox Jewish sect that owns that amazing place) I wanted to take photos.
Have you taken many photos, he asked?
No, I said. I’m not sure I’ve ever taken any. And I’ve never owned a camera, not since college.
We talked for awhile, and I got my first Canon. And I drove with Izzy out to Kinney Road in the cold and started taking photos of sunsets, and then dead leaves on my path. These photos were not good and to this day I don’t know why I made that phone call, or what prompted it.
I do remember my daughter telling me it was a good idea. She is very encouraging in that way. (She said the same thing about the videos). I believe the first photos were love letters to Maria. As an artist, she supports art wherever she finds it. We didn’t know one another too well then. But she looked on my blog every night and she called me up and talked about the photos, and told me how promising they were. It was the only way in which we spoke for a long time. I think my photos are still love letters to Maria, and that’s why there is emotion in them.
Canon’s expensive L series lenses did hurt either.
Whatever the reasoning, something inside of me very much wanted to come out of me, and the light came on in my soul, in many ways, and I now shudder to think of a life without photos. I do, in fact, see the world anew.
Every day my heart just rises and I often laugh out loud in joy when I spot a photo like the one above. I don’t know why, it just touches me. I hope the videos will be the same.
A few weeks after I started putting up my photos, I started getting advice and criticism from a famous photographer who was succumbing to a chronic illness. Every morning he came onto my blog, looked at my photos and sent me an often blistering e-mail.
But he said many things that stuck in my consciousness to this day, two years after his death. One of them was, “you can take a beautiful photo of anything, absolutely anything, anywhere you go, if you keep your eyes and mind open.” I think of you, David, and I bless you and thank you for caring about my work and guiding it. If you are watching me still, I ought to tell you that those were good and meaningful words.”