We emphasized the creativeness that happens at the moment of seeing over the kind that takes place in the dark room.
A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.
The development of a love of medium and a responsibility for one's own pictures is an overall goal.
We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.
The reason why we want to remember an image varies: because we simply 'love it,' or dislike it so intensely that it becomes compulsive, or because it has made us realize something about ourselves, or has brought about some slight change in us. Perhaps the reader can recall some image, after the seeing of which he has never been quite the same.
When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of my Self.
Students were taught by doing.
The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.
Some of the young photographers today enter photography where I leave off. My "grandchildren" astound me. What I worked for they seem to be born with. So I wonder where Their affirmations of Spirit will lead. My wish for them is that their unfolding proceeds to fullness of Spirit, however astonishing or anguished their lives.
Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair or triplet of essential images.
The state of mind of the photographer creating is a blank. I might add that this condition exists only at special times, namely when looking for pictures. -Something keeps him from falling off curbs, down open manholes, into bumpers of skidding trucks while in this condition but goes off duty at other times. . . . This is a very special kind of blank. A very active state of mind really, it is a very receptive state. . .
To engage a sequence, we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the one in our eye.
It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.
Different levels of photography require different levels of understanding and skill. A "press the button, let George do the rest" photographer needs little or no technical knowledge of photography. A zone system photographer takes more responsibility. He visualizes before he presses the button, and afterwards calibrates for predictable print values.
Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.
In putting images together I become active, and excitement is of another order - synthesis overshadows analysis.
