How High the Sky?

People have often asked me how I knew I wanted to be a photographer, and the answer is at once quite simple, yet has perplexed me psychologically for over 40 years.

When I was young, I would often go to the Museum of Modern Art, not as something I wanted to do, but rather it was something I thought I should do. I would look at the art, and the photography, and feel (except for the color palate of some of the paintings), very little connection to them. Their abstraction, their take on the world at the time, felt very estranged from me. I was anxious, confused, and dumbfounded by life, and most of this art did nothing to resolve my conflicts. In fact, their disoriented nature only confounded me more.

And then… there was this miraculous day, out of the blue, or should I say grayness of a New York winter’s day, in my sophomore year of college. On Christmas break, I dragged myself once again to the MoMA. I remember walking in the old building, and something on the 3rd floor, outside of the permanent collection of photography, caught my eye, and I decided to look again at the photographs.

I began, as always, with early 19th Century photographs, and slowly made my way to the more contemporary, which at that time, was about 1930-1965.

I have to digress, and pontificate for a moment. As I saw it, in my fashion, painting had already made the leap to abstraction and conceit. It slowly had begun the evolutionary process of abstracting itself from the world and becoming more cerebral. I don’t care how much, or how often one states that abstraction is the process of quantifying and qualifying life to its essence, a way of realizing an emotional core, an awareness. To me, this modern painterly process, although somewhat successful with Cezanne and others, had begun the process of becoming distant from a life I wanted to lead. Art for art’s sake had won, at least for a while.

And then, there was Edward Steichen, (the remaining curator of photography at the MoMa, who was also quickly replaced after this visit). His affirmation of life and love, not only in his own work, but in exhibitions he mounted, such as The Family of Man, etc., was replaced with a meanspirited, dispassionate, and very angry view of the world. This became the norm, and was more in keeping with painting and sculpture.

But on this very special day, which I think happened to be very close to my 20th birthday, I made the turn in the gallery, and began that day to discover Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, Reni Burri, Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, etc. My life was never the same again. I looked at these pictures over and over again, getting more and more excited, and saying and feeling to myself I can do this. This is for me. This is my life.

So for the last 40 years, I’ve been trying to figure out what this epiphany meant. I did go on from there, but what did I see and feel in these photographs? Stay tuned…