This picture was taken a few months after my father died. In late August of 1972, when I was 25 years old, a wonderful thing happened to me. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. It was afternoon on a late summer's day in Connecticut. I was mowing the lawn, when my wife came out to me to tell me that my uncle was on the phone. My father had just died of a massive heart attack. Suddenly, just like that, it was over. The grandmaster, superman himself, had just died, and with it, all the battles I was fighting came crashing to a halt. I had gone from feeling desperate to separate myself from him, to feeling totally alone and helpless without him. He had always felt like the source of my power, and without him, I now felt like nothing. Another wonderful thing was the total loss of his wealth. You see, my early life was one of great privilege. I was raised in a 19th Century life in the mid-20th Century. There were grand houses, servants, chauffeurs, luxurious cars, and travel, and this too, on that fateful day in 1972, was all gone. Most people today who meet me, and knew my family, assume that I had inherited my father's wealth. But fortunately for me... like him, the money was all gone. This is a great story, (a Hollywood epic of sorts), but it's a story for another time. So commencing in the fall of 1972, there was no one to battle with, and very little money to survive. I was on my own. I somehow paid for my last year of graduate school, and began the journey of becoming not just a maker of photographs, but the struggle and battle of becoming a photographer. As Robert Anderson once wrote, "death ends a life, but not a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind." This has been my life's work. Surprisingly, my father is gone, but he has never left me. For 40 years, his voice has been with me. I have struggled, and perhaps finally at age 62, have just begun to End, like the book, my struggles with him. As the book title denotes, the end is just the beginning. Today, February 22, 2010, a terrible thing has happened. I miss my father. I miss his wisdom, his strength, his humor, but he is not here to share my life. I have begun to put my struggles with him to an end. I think he would finally look at his son and be proud. To all of you who struggle to make photographs, the life you lead is not just one of imagery. These are the symptoms, the reflections of your life. It is what's on the inside that makes you a photographer, rather than simply someone who takes pictures. This is a life struggle. The talent is to find a way to do it on your own.

While the U.S. of A. observes the birth of its first president, I am respectfully sunning myself in beautiful Key Largo, Florida. I shall return to the blogosphere with radiant insights next Monday. Until then, my loyal followers...

I feel that my very core photographic existence today has been a maturing or transitioning process from my earliest years as a photographer. I keep reflecting on the idea that to go forward requires continual reflection on where I've been. Firstly, back to the days in graduate school, as I mentioned last week, my primary, or at least my degree focus in school, was in Theology, but... equal time in school was spent studying photography in class, and in the darkroom. I learned my craft with great discipline and rigor. I learned how to expose my film, carefully and properly, and to utilize the right developer and printing techniques, which best reflecteed my inner psychological needs. My prints were rich, very black, strong shadow detail, and contrasty. This did not happen haphazardly. I spent hundreds of hours mixing and trying different developer and printing techniques, to nurture and achieve this emotional intensity I needed expressed in my prints. For the most part, other students achieved or wanted a tonal balance, or a full tonal range to their prints. I wanted this, but I also wanted more. I wanted the 35mm camera to achieve the technical tonal results of a large format camera. I worked and worked, never happy with the results. The image was never sharp enough, the tonality not rich or intense enough. It was a struggle to realize my potential. My hero at the time was W. Eugene Smith. My prints were like his, yet they were quite different. It appeared to me that for most students, light was necessary to render an object or person. The purpose of light was for exposure. The more you had, the greater latitude for exposure. Of course, people have always been interested in good light, or special light, (sunrise or sunset, "the golden hours"), but no one I'm aware of ever questioned the purpose, not only of light as a source for exposure and quality, but of illumination. Of course, if you go back a few hundred years, or perhaps even just to the 19th Century, painters were consciously, or unconsciously aware of light as a source of illumination, like the illuminated manuscripts of the Renaissance era. For me, the light I used in my photographs was not only an aesthetic choice, but rather a source of knowledge and wisdom. Light provides the illumination, which provides wisdom and knowledge. In his gospel, John, one of Christ's disciples, refers to light as the source of all knowledge. Without it, there is only darkness and despair. It is not that I only believe this, but in my early work, light seems to be one of the main sources of great portraiture. The light of the Middle East, where these examples were taken, is unique. I often found myself wondering if the light reflected or created certain events. There is obviously some purpose, whether otherworldly or purely mundane, that creates the light of this geography. It is also true in Flanders, where the light…

To my devoted readers, I'm so sorry we did not get the blog up yesterday. We had extreme technical difficulties. For some reason, when we came to the studio first thing Monday morning, we found the building upside down. It took us the whole day just to right it, and thereafter, to reorient ourselves to what is up and what is down. Don't dispair. Everything is now in order. I thought this week it is about time to talk about this picture, as it is tipped on to the slipcase of the book. For those interested, the tip-on is an original silver gelatin print, made in our darkroom, and required many hours of printing to make each one. For many people, this photograph has become the iconic image for The End. The printing, as I described earlier, is a problem in and of itself. The message is as painstaking to fathom as the print is to create. First for the mundane. This picture was made some years ago on a rooftop in Manhattan. If you look closely, you can see the photograph was made at 4:57 pm on a summer's day. It was 83 degrees at the time. Marking the moment was somewhat deliberate. I shot this picture very quickly, and it was never used, as it was not the one I was originally commissioned to make. Although it was not quite as terrifying as it looks, it was still very frightening. In all, the picture could not have taken more than five minutes to make. Now for the extra-ordinary. As much as any other picture in the book, this photograph seems to feel like a self-portrait. It is me metaphorically, but it is not me physically. Ironically, I was just feet away, yet the picture is not of me, yet it is me. You are seeing me, and yet you are not looking at me. I've shown you a great deal about myself, yet you do not see the physical me. All my pictures are like this, but this one is special. People, for many years, going all the way back to my deceased parents, have often asked and questioned me why I spent so much time studying theology, if I always had the intention of being a photographer. What is the connection, what is the purpose? Ironically, from my own self-interested perspective, my answer could almost mimic a favorite anecdote: Thoreau, a 19th Century Transcendentalist writer, had been arrested for civil disobedience, and was sequestered in a small one-room jail in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson, another 19th Century writer, his friend, comes up to the window on the outside of the jail, and calls out to Thoreau, more in the vernacular of their day, "Why are you in there?" Thoreau yells out,"That is not the right question. The right question is 'why are you still out there?'" The study of theology was not purely an academic experience. It was fundamental to my life. It was my beginnings with the…