The last few weeks I have been feeling in/out/and besides my sorts. I can’t seem to equalize all the turmoil, but Christmas is arising and I am off to see America and grandchildren, and life is slowly returning to an equilibrium. So, before I become so mellow and slip into a meditative trance, I thought I would write you a few more words of wisdom to lead us into the upcoming year. I have told this story in the past, so for those who have heard it before, please forgive, and place those new reindeer earmuffs over your ears as I tell it again. People are often asking me what influenced my life that made me choose the life of a photographer. Here below is one of my answers. When thinking about what were the most important experiences in my life, particularly those that had an effect on me as a photographer, here is one in particular story that stands out.  This may sound peculiar to you, but it seems perfectly normal to me.  The experience I'm about to relate has nothing to do with photography.  In thinking about this, this seems to be a pattern in my life.  I studied theology with the intention of being a photographer.  At first glance, one would think they have nothing to do with each other.  But, in fact, they are intimately and intricately entwined. About 30 years ago, give or take a year or two, I had the good fortune to attend a lecture by Jerzy Kosinksi.  For those of you who don't know who he is, or rather, I should say was, as he committed suicide some years ago, he was a director and writer of one of my favorite films, Being There.  At that time I had just become a fellow at Timothy Dwight College at Yale University.  A few times a year, the master of the college would invite people to lecture to other fellows.  It was a group of about 50-75 people.  As I lived in New York, it was hard for me to get to New Haven, but luckily that night I made it.  I'll try to recap the lecture or perhaps I should call it a story. Jerzy (after this lecture, I became so interested in him, we actually became quite good friends) began the lecture talking about sitting by a swimming pool in some hotel in Thailand.  He said he was sitting there peacefully reading a newspaper, when a number of Buddhist monks walked into the pool and began a conversation amongst themselves in the deep end of the pool.  As he described it, they were not standing in the pool, nor treading water.  He described it as having achieved buoyancy. For hours, they did not struggle to float, but rather were able to stand in the water in this buoyant state. The remainder of the lecture was his personal odyssey to try and learn how these men were able to do this.  He described his upbringing in a…

Beside the fact that I never camp, I am still not a happy camper. I have been putting off writing my ruminations because I feel like a lone wolf in the arctic, howling into an empty world with nobody listening. But alas, like a good fool who continually hits his head against a solid wall, I will get all my ranting out today and next week I will arrive with a more gentle Yule tide spirit. Many years ago I had the good fortune to spend some days with Ansel Adams in his house and darkroom. It was an era when photographic technique was truly a test of craftsmanship. There was a nuance to technique; one that would help exemplify one's own inner feelings. One's technical expertise was like a painter's expression through his brush work. A painter's choice of pigment and it's expression would help to reflect their inner demons or strivings. It was a further affirmation of their vision. As I was intense and nurturing a very critical eye, my needs were for deep rich shadow detail. I struggled for years with developers, papers, etc., to find the right formulas. My copy of Ansel Adams, The Negative and The Print became so thread bare it became like a sarcophagus that had dried out and would crumble into dust with the slightest touch. Over the years I would correspond with Ansel Adams, and finally an opportunity arose to spend slightly more than a week with him in Carmel, CA. At the time I was primarily a 35 mm and large format photographer, and my pictures aesthetically had very little relationship to his, but my technique was all derived from Mr. A. So I spent a good part of a long week with him, pumping him in his darkroom, at lunch, etc., with every conceivable technical question I could think of. He most graciously answered EVERY question. All his photographic history, experience and photographic life he was willing to share with me, and I listened very, VERY carefully. It distilled down to this. There is no easy answer. There is no pill to take the embodies you with technical and aesthetic wisdom. If you want to be a classics scholar (a.k.a a noble photographer) you must learn all the rudiments. You must learn Latin, Greek, and you must study endlessly. You must spend years with your craft and you must live your life and mingle your craft with your feelings. On occasion someone is so vulnerable that they can skip a few steps but this is a rare gift from the Gods. Life must flow in your heart and be regulated by your discipline and craftsmanship. So I say to the nice lady who wrote me a rather angry letter, that since it took only a few seconds to take a picture (not months or years like a painting) that my pictures are only worth a few hundred of dollars, not the thousands that I charge, it may have taken…