If you ever make anything too literal you might as well forget it. It loses everything.
I taught myself to use a camera - it's not very difficult to use a camera, but I never bothered looking at any textbooks on how to make a picture. I had a much more casual relation to it. For me at the time it was much more about the process rather than the results.
When I began taking photographs I thought they might work better in magazines, in a journalistic sense, rather than as art.