In the urban centers of America, there is the annual summer ritual for school children of Camp. Parents left with the notion, this almost free-floating anxiety, of children Home Alone for two to three months with no schedule is overwhelming and downright unacceptable. So, someone in the great spirit of the American frontiersmen, created Camp, as a great learning and socializing adventure for all these wanderlust children. The urban elite would learn from the great outdoors, smell the pines, eat by campfire, and sing the summer songs of camp. Those of us born in the urban jungle of Manhattan were then being shipped off to the tranquil, mosquito infested backwoods of New England for fun and sport. There was only one problem for me: I hated camp. I hated competitive sports, I hated the heat, most of the kids, the embarrassment of undressing in front of hundreds of boys, I hated the discipline, I hated camp. In fact, if I look at my ten to twelve years of camp with a huge squint to try and turn reality into nostalgia, I can't remember one moment after my first year where I was happy, except for the day I was leaving to go home. Holden Caulfield's alienation from society had nothing on me. The only time I can remember thinking that this was at all valuable was in Lariat class, where we would twist plastic twine in colors to make Lariats for whistles I never needed. When I was very young, seven years old, I was probably the only child left back in camp. I repeated my tinker year twice. This is the week that children from all over America reunite with their families from their summer at camp. It was the week of the summer I liked best. Finally free from one burden before the onset of the next. Camp was actually very important to my pictures. There was, after my first year at camp, a basic shift in me, a cataclysmic trauma which has continued to the very present. I am still living a post-traumatic syndrome that I first recognized in camp in the Summer of 1953. Next Tuesday, instead of recollecting all the joys of summer, I will begin the story of my fall from grace. After the Summer of 1953, as the summer heat turned to the cool of autumn, I found my life radically changed. The Summer of 1952, the summer of joy and friendships was over, the harvest had passed, and I was not refreshed. Stay tuned.

I'm having a really hard time this week writing about what I want to, my wife Leslie, "the force that through the green fuse drives my flower," but I'm worried I may be straying too far afield from photography. Of course, if one were interested in me personally, then this would all be good grist for the mill; but, if one is interested in the photographs (the text, as they say in the new vernacular) maybe I am straying too far from the source. I try to assume that my interior house has many doors you could enter through, and still find your way to the heart of the matter. This blog has become so peculiar to me, because even though I am very public in my pictures, I am actually very private in my deepest thoughts. But onward and upward we go on this wonderfully dreary Tuesday morning. So two weeks ago, my wife, my daughter, and myself went off to Spain, Barcelona in particular, for a vacation. Essentially, the reason for our trip was an exhibition of my work in a museum in Teruel, about four hours from Barcelona, which was wonderful and very special, but this escapade will wait for another time. What I really want to talk about is Leslie, the ying to my yang. She is quiet to my notoriousness, focused and hardworking, while I am lazy, and love most to eat and nap. Where we most compliment each other though, is in our sense of humor. You see, I think myself quite funny, a modern day Woody Allen with a camera. And Leslie, to my great despair, has no sense of humor, I mean none, nada, nichts. Here I am, making jokes, trying my best to be funny, and it falls on flat ears.  She reminds me of a dog who looks quizzically at you with a sideward glance, trying to figure out what planet this person has come from. One would think that this lack of simpatico would be a problem, but in fact, without her realizing it, she is my straight-man. If I am Hardy, she must be Laurel. I used to be able to capture this in film. We have now been married almost twenty years, and it is time to start again with my Leslie book. Harry Callahan had Eleanor, Steiglitz had Georgia O'Keefe, and I have my Leslie. So back to our wonderful hotel in Barcelona, which Leslie had found and organized in her special way. We were in our beautiful five-star hotel, and I was so happy because the bed was so comfortable. I could nap with a spiritual satisfaction. Why bother, when you are a few hundred feet from Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, to see it in person when you can see it perfectly well in your dreams. Now Leslie is a woman who needs to blow her hair. There is always this constant hum in the background, morning or evening, of hair being blown this way and…

One of the very few ways my father and I communicated was over our love of cars. I must admit, my father, despite his disappointment in me, was never at a loss for words for a beautiful car, or a beautiful woman. Put the two together, and something almost extraterrestrial could occur. So it was no surprise, considering his vast wealth, that he always had an array of beautiful, highly polished auto machines. When I was very very young, I can remember we used to tool around town in an MGT convertible. Before the words MG were known to anyone but true automobile aficionados. From there, in the late 1950's, he graduated from sports to luxury, and would always have a black Eldorado convertible, with red leather upholstery. But then all hell broke loose in 1960. My father decided to get really serious about his cars. He had reached his early 40's, and it was time. I can remember one afternoon going with him to the showroom. He agonized over the color and the leather, and 6 to 8 months later, a beautiful Rolls Royce Phantom was delivered to our house. He inspected it proudly, and out of nowhere, a man in a perfectly pressed apron arrived with a small container of paint brushes, and together he and my father discussed the various options to personalize his new machine with delicate stripes of paint, and of course, detailing his doors with his signature SS, his initials. It was at this point that Alex appeared. We already had Martin and Fritze to partially help maintain the house, cook, and drive, but with the arrival of Alex, my automobile life was complete. Once a week, all of my father's cars were washed, waxed, buffed, and shined until even the reflection of me, an unattractive, ungainly boy, began to look triumphant. I don't know what Alex did, but if women could package it, he would have died richer than Bill Gates. When you open my father's door, Mark Cross (a famous leather store at the time), did nothing to compete with the aroma of voluptuous leather and history. His car was like driving within a leather suitcase. But enough about all this, let's get to the point of the story... One Summer's day, in the Summer of 1964, when I had just received my driver's license a few months before, my father told me to get up, and that he wanted to take me someplace. By this time, the family had three cars: my father's, my mother's, and the chauffeur's wooden station wagon, which was used for errands. How many more cars does a small family need? I was content driving around in our station wagon. He wouldn't tell me where we were going until he pulled up in front of a Jaguar dealership, in a small town near where we lived. He told me he wanted to get me my own car to celebrate my ability to drive, and he could not…

Many years ago, when I was just beginning as a photographer, I received a wonderful and unexpected gift: a fellowship to live in Jerusalem for close to 100 days. I've written anecdotes about some of my experiences and thoughts about this period in my first book, which is entitled In the Land of Light, and Elie Wiesel was kind enough to write an introduction, but there are still a few thoughts and stories which to this day that resonate with me, which I feel somehow reflect upon my pictures today, which are quite different visually, but are still similar in their intent. I remember some years ago looking through a book of Cartier-Bresson's photographs entitled The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson, published in 1968 (to this day remaining one of my favorite photographic books) and being curious about what picture he had chosen from Jerusalem for this publication. As I found the one picture in the book taken in Jerusalem, I immediately recognized the spot in which it was taken. I realized at some point during my stay in Jerusalem I had been there. For some time, I could not remember why this place was so familiar, because for me the location was of little importance in Cartier-Bresson's picture. One afternoon as I was under construction in my home, I was discussing with someone about how what lies behind the walls is as important to me as what lies outside. As if struck by lightning, it came to me. I now knew about the place where Cartier-Bresson had photographed years before me. You see, we were both standing in the exact same spot, but it had taken me some years to realize that we had taken two totally different photographs from the same place. He was interested in what was transpiring on the outside, and I was interested in what was illuminated on the inside. You see, I was standing right in the doorway in Cartier-Bresson's picture to take the picture you see above. Like the interior of my home, what lies within is ultimately as important as what lies without. Today, my pictures perhaps look less concerned with what lies beneath and within than they did when I was young, but don't let the clothes fool you. I am still putting together the pieces, organizing the puzzle that is me, and looking as deeply as ever in my pictures, at a life that has to come from somewhere within. PS: If anyone is interested, a few new copies of In the Land of Light, published by Houghton Mifflin 1983, are still available at the studio through my website here. This book is long out-of-print. PPS: I'm off to drink some Sangria, relax my tired bones, and go to an exhibition of my work in Spain. The blog will return and reunite all my disassembled parts in two weeks from today. Buenos noches and good luck.