First, I want to invite everyone to my book release party this Wednesday night, September thirtieth.  For those of you in New York, it will be fairly easy. For those of you out of town, I suggest you purchase your airline tickets now! Theory, the clothing line, will hold the book signing at its shop in the Bloomingdale’s Men Store on fifty-ninth street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. 6:00-8:00 PM.  Come buy a book. Or not.  We can meet and just talk. And drink. Regardless, I hope you all can make it. Second, Kodak Propass magazine recently did a short article on me and on the new book.  Please feel free to peruse it here if you would like. Their insight is always significant. Last, I think this spread, which was shot for the cover of the New York Times Magazine, is significant because it highlights all the people who helped make this book a success. Walter Thomas, a genius if ever there were one, wrote the text, and gave some of the funniest and most insightful comments I have ever encountered.  His words are the perfect complement to my pictures.  David Meredith painstakingly designed each spread in a way that is strikingly beautiful and artistically astute.  And finally, Kim Blanchette of Blanchette Press in Vancouver has achieved a triumph in printing.  His work is spectacular, and I am incredibly grateful every time I hear his name.  To any art directors, photographers, authors, or anyone else who may have a printing need, you could not possibly go wrong with Kim Blanchette.

While it’s Monday morning as I write this, this may not be posted until later, as I’m currently at 35,000 in the air feet on my way to the tropics for a shoot. I apologize if I’m late. Today, I’m posting a favorite picture that conjures up for me three different things. First, I have found that when I am able to let go the most, my pictures are the best. This was shot in Paris, at an old building on the grounds of a French Royal Garden called Parc de Sceaux.  We had shot for about an hour upstairs.  We were just leaving and as I saw the model, dressed in a robe, descending this beautiful staircase. I asked him to run down the stairs once more.  I snapped a few frames.  It couldn’t have taken longer than a couple of minutes, and it ended up my favorite picture from the whole shoot. If I keep my eyes open, and my sense of awareness keen, good things will come from it. Second, this picture helps me explore the philosophical, or even psychological aspect of the way I shoot.  Many of my pictures look carefully planned out; however, as I’ve illustrated above, it is often the spontaneity of the moment that creates great photographs.  For this reason, I do not shoot Polaroids, and I do not shoot digitally. Many photographers, in order to please the client shoot in-camera polaroids as a way of confirming they have the picture.  For me, this drains the shoot of spontaneity and mystery. The same goes for on camera displays in digital photography.  I appreciate film for the mystery, and I’ve used the same films all my photographic life: Kodak Plus-X and Tri-X. One thing I really love about being a photographer is the fact that you can play with perceptions of reality. People have a certain concept of reality: gravity makes objects fall; fire burns; running encompasses certain qualities. The camera can slightly play with this perception of reality. As I’ve never been sure of what is real or not real, this has always been appealing to me. I think this clicked for me when I first read Kierkegaard.  He talked about the Leap of Faith, a moment in time where one must leap off a precipice and act on faith and trust. I guess this is where people are able to say “I believe.” I’ve never been able to do this. I’ve never been able to leave the real world and believe in a supernatural one.  On the other hand, I’ve always been willing to use a camera and play with reality. The last thing this picture conjures up is the spirit of romance.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s just the location.  Maybe it’s the spirit of the picture. Maybe it’s the movement. Maybe it’s the altitude of this flight. But it seems ethereal and otherworldly. This spirit of romance is totally lacking in most contemporary photography. The vernacular in which most…

I’m going to go out on a limb, and say this: In order to say something outward, something universal, you must first look inward. I’m sure there are many people who would not agree with me, and that’s fine.  This picture conjures up for me the idea of self-reflection. When I was very young, in my early twenties, I had this tremendous amount of anxiety, emotional intensity that needed an outlet.  I didn’t know how to do it.  Photography became a means to the end of allowing me to express myself.  But I also knew at the same time that it was an incomplete expression—there was much more inside me that needed to get out.  So I began the process of psychotherapy. To me, therapy isn’t just the art of healing—although there is a lot of that included in it—but perhaps more important is the way it allows you to follow Socrates’ declaration: Know thyself. Therapy, and the resulting introspection, allowed me to become sensitive to the parts of me that were hidden, or repressed, or unavailable to me consciously.  It was an incredibly wonderful gift that the twentieth century gave to me.  Many of these pictures in this book are a direct result of that. To say a photographer has a vision is to say the photographer has something unique to say to about the world.  Why do some photographers have something unique to say, when so many others just shoot pictures that are general and lacking vision? Most people would say it has to do with talent. Maybe. But maybe not.  Maybe it has nothing to do with talent.  Maybe it has to do with the ability to express one’s feelings. The person who presents a strong vision has figured out a way to express his or her feelings, while others are struggling to do that. Talent, then, becomes not so much artistic talent, though that may be a good part of it, but rather emotional talent. This applies to music as well: much of music, obviously, is a technical skill, as is photography.  However, the difference between a good musician and a great musician is, I think quite obvious: emotion. When I was in Israel right after graduate school, I sat in on master classes with Arthur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern, Alexander Schneider, and Gina Bachauer.  I remember a particular class with Isaac Stern.  They had some of Israel’s greatest prodigies on the violin.  They would play in a technically perfect way.  But then Isaac Stern would play the same thing.  It was like night and day.  The difference was not so much that Isaac Stern knew the notes any better; rather, he could feel it better. He knew himself and his emotions better.

All good things must come to an end.  All my photographic life I was obsessed with the compulsion to make my pictures as sharp as possible.  When I was a graduate student, I would spend hours working with all different types of films and developers trying to get the acuity of a 4x5 camera into the composition and film size of a 35mm.  This obsession with sharpness was not just because it was titillating and fun, but because I felt that the camera’s eye had a greater acuity than my own vision; therefore, I was able to see clearer and sharper with the camera than with my own eye.   The camera was like an extension of my eye in and helped in my attempt to get as close—philosophically, emotionally, metaphorically—as possible to somebody or something. And so, there was always this kind of dialectic: I always tried to see the world clearer and sharper, and as an end result it was never sharp enough, never clear enough, and never resolved enough.  It is probably what always pushes one forward, but it was always frustrating.  And so, probably in an ultimate attempt to kind of deal with it all, I decided to blur a picture. This picture, shot in 2001, is one of the early results of that.  Of course, it’s a lot easier to shoot like this than it is to shoot a sharp picture. On the one hand, this picture is in contradistinction to what I’ve been doing for most of my life. On the other hand, it’s a continuation of it.  If you look back on this blog to the picture of leaning house, you’ll see that the house has many entrances to it: you can go in the front door, you can go in the back door, or you can go in the side door.  In this case, I was going in the side door, it’s just not as readily apparent.