Bob, do you remember the article in U.S. Camera, "Recipe For Seeing" by David Vestal? Well, I reread it several times after getting your letter, and suddenly realized I had completely missed its point. I now find that it has much to say about the line along which I have tentatively been traveling, and there are several key phrases I want to discuss.
The vital ingredients of your photography are the things you see that you care about. They are your own complex reactions to your own personal and private experiences. You can't share them with people except by giving expression to them. You know instinctively, if you permit yourself to know, what you need, who you are, and what you must do. Photograph things you have strong or clear feelings about. Mean what you say. Work for your own satisfaction, not to please others. Working to please yourself is neither capricious or anti-social, it is a practical approach based on working with what you can know. You can't know what others feel anymore than you can live their lives for them. When you photograph people who are showing emotion, the feeling you work from is still your own--triggered by association with what they seem to be going through. You could be quite mistaken about them, and still express your own feelings accurately through the way you see and show their expressions.
In doing something creative, something expressive, Bob, you must do it with your whole being. There can be no secrets, nothing held back. When you press the shutter release you must say, this is me, this is what I believe, or else the result is only a sham having no involvement with the subject. It will only be the result of certain mechanical actions. Possibly this sounds unimportant, but I don't believe it can be taken lightly.
It is better to act on casual impulses than to carry out planned projects for which you have carefully figured out everything according to what you think you should feel. The problem people get into when they begin to follow a system or theory instead of their own eyes and sensitivity is that they prevent anything really good from happening to them unless it fits the doctrine of their choice.
I would carry this further and add to system and theory, pattern of life. Being creative demands a love of life, an involvement with people, a continuous wonderment at the differences in the world, and also a mind receptive to all forms of expression by the people, races, and things of that world. Above all, this means banishing the fear of life and of living from your consciousness. As long as you are afraid of people, of new ideas, and of the effects they might have on you, you cannot truly be experiencing life to its fullest and thus are severely limiting your creative abilities. Life can be such a beautiful evolving kaleidoscope of colors, faces, patterns, sounds and scenes if only you will allow yourself to become enmeshed in it. Push out, permit yourself to expand, to experience to the fullest.
Judson Powell, an artist from Watts, probably said it best one night: You have to take the fear out of your life. Once you do that, you really begin to live. I wish that I could say it more directly, but I cannot. This is not something you can express verbally, it is an experience itself.
If you analyze, you will see that pictures are not ends in themselves, but only means to ends. More important is what you start from, the thing the picture is about: an experience that is alive for you, so fine or so awful that you are moved to do something about it. Art does not come first with wise artists; life does. Art is a way of knowing life and of telling about it, passing it on. The manufacture of pictures, in itself, means nothing. Living needs no justification, no motivation, no explaining. There it is: living is everything for us. Photography at its best is one good way of knowing that you are alive and making the most of it.
This is the TRUTH, baby, as best as it can be written. I know one man here in LA who is a living example of this last paragraph--Noah Purifoy. Noah and I have spent hours talking, discussing two things mostly: living and being. We were brought together by his art, but we seldom ever discuss it. That is just a front. It pays his bills and it keeps a constant influx of people through his life from whom he draws inspiration and ideas and to whom he tries to dispense his own particular recipe for living. However, most people will never have the benefit of communicating with this man and thus they will never know why their lives are so empty and his so full. (to be continued...)
