There is a reason for that. I was a single dad in my late 20’s and necessity plunged me into a career in wine, one that I was very good at, in sales and marketing. And it paid the bills and left me with a little at the end of that career so I wouldn’t have to financially struggle too much in the autumn of my life.
I loved wine and the people in it. Eight years on, I have little of that world left, save for my weekly blog and the occasional trade article or magazine piece. I don’t need the money from writing. It is just a way to stay connected to a community, although from what I can surmise, most of the relationships were transactional. Of those relationships, most of them were with males — I was and still am a good friend to them. However, I realize they didn’t have an upbringing or the sensitivity to be a good friend to me. As in sales, you hope for the best, but you don’t always get the order. So it has been in the wine world as well.
That said, I have pivoted back to photography full-bore. I have equipment that I feel “at one with,” which is important when one is making images. I have an archive that is rich and deep and keeps me occupied. And I take a camera with me whenever I go out. Always. I am a photographer and have been one for over sixty years now. It is who I am, it is how I see the world and it is how I respond and react to the sensations and images that are placed before me.
I will not be famous for my work in these times. Partly because the rules of the game have changed, and also because I don’t follow the trends in photography. I have looked at millions of images in my lifetime. Those images are like all the wines I have tasted in my lifetime. I remember them. And my goal has been to make images that transcend time and fashion, and my quest has simply been for one thing – beauty.
I know whatever penchant I have for preference of images, especially when I am espousing images that transcend time and are unequivocally “beautiful,” I can’t help but wonder how much are just my personal and cultural prejudices that frame all of that. I am aware that what I call timeless is not a viewpoint without trappings. There are cultural, social and generational influences that have shaped it. Now, a lot of what I saw and made add up to a big bag of accumulated evidence. The question isn't whether my eye was shaped by culture — everyone's was — it's whether the shaping produced something with its own integrity and consistency over time. I’d argue it did.
I have had some great teachers, some who were a huge part of the history of photographic artistry. Among them were Wynn Bullock, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Lisette Model, Robert Frank and Jerry Uelsmann. Some of them started out when photography was a new medium and hadn’t yet been accepted as an art form. They blazed trails, literally, to express images that now the art world accepts and even reveres. My takeaway, the great lesson I learned from those teachers, was to make an image that would last through time and 20-30-40 years later still be compelling. And yes, beautiful.
I’d say street photography, or reportage, is one area that I was early on interested in. It was challenging to me, because I was shy and I am introverted. So to put myself on a busy foreign city sidewalk and shoot away was not something I could easily approach. I did learn early on, from Ralph Hattersley, a technique in which I could make myself more or less invisible. Nowadays, being invisible is second nature, due to my advanced age and the way in which many people see (or don’t see) elders. That is right fine by me, by the way. It is their time to shine; it is my time to mind the stream for images that will be as potent when I am long gone as they will be to me in the present moment.
One of my teachers recently suggested I work on a series, as opposed to a willy-nilly smattering of unrelated images. I did not initially warm to that advice, because I thought the progression of my photo making over the years had a thread which tied everything together. The problem was that it was only I that saw that thread, which had something to do with the way I process memory (see above with regards to wine and image retention). But I realized that gallery owners and the gatekeepers needed these neat little packages so that they could communicate more simply to their patrons. I get that from my wine sales days. But my wine sales days are behind me, and now I am a little more stubborn and pertinacious. I’m sure that will cost me something, but my artistic sensibilities are what they are, for better or worse. And I have learned to live with that. Like I said earlier, I am not going to be famous because of my photography, No one will find boxes of my negatives at an estate sale and resuscitate me the way they did Vivian Maier. That's fine. She was one of the great photographers of her time and deserved the recognition, even if it came too late.
What I have realized in the sixty plus years of shooting, is that the process, not the product, is the path. Yes, the product must be timeless and stunning and compelling and beautiful, in my opinion. But the odyssey of a lifetime in photography is the prize. That steady drumbeat — the one that has been keeping time beneath everything for sixty years — that is the significance of photography for me.
