I imagine photographers are like fishermen with “big one that got away” stories. If you only could have seen what happened outside “Terminal 1? after I made these pictures and the camera was full!

Gary Winogrand, one of the best known street photographers, was once asked how he felt about the photographs he missed while he was reloading his camera with a new roll of film. He replied “There are no photographs while I’m reloading.”

Memory cards are cheap. Batteries are cheap. Film is cheap. You can never have too much of any of these.

You’ll know that you are really hooked when you start carrying a second camera in case the first one fails (which it will, probably at the most inconvenient moment).

You probably already know this, but if you have an iPod there’s a little attachment you can buy that let’s you download your photos to it. It’s basically just a little portable hard drive (the iPod). Once you do that you can clear the memory on your camera and keep shooting. You can transfer the photos from the iPod to your computer later.

Ah, I wasn’t suggesting that you should (or did) change the photo. Was really just commenting on the different way we view a photo, as compared with a painting. It’s related to the way we look at the world, which we tend to think of photos as objective views of (even if we know better). My painting teacher once asked “why don’t we ever look at a cow and say the spots are in the wrong place?”

Also, why have you been avoiding looking at photos. Have you avoided looking at buildings w/ electric lights or at roads that had cars in them? When you moved from the US to Europe did you sail on a wooden ship? How was avoiding photos keeping your vision pure?

Colin, I mentioned earlier that as a painter I felt threatened by photography. My avoidance of photos (even looking at them) bordered on fanatical. To illustrate, a couple of days ago I was in my father’s office at UCSD. There was a photograph of a small child. I said “Who is that?” My father said, “That is your daughter at the age of one.”

Colin, I have probably looked at my daughter as closely as anyone has ever looked at their own child, because I have studied her for years with life drawing and sculpting. But I did not recognize her in the photo because I never made photos of her and I went to great lengths to avoid seeing them. This is because I wanted to have a pure, non-photographic vision, which is what I used in this painting, for example. (By the way, the painting is a collaborative work with Hanneke van Oosterhout).

I did not pick up the camera lightly when I began with this a week or so ago. I knew it would have profound effects on me. To answer your question from the perspective of this moment, I don’t think I could paint in the same way ever again. I don’t know what the future will hold, of course.

I am not going anywhere near a paintbrush for the time being.

. . .

David,

Playing around with the computer informed me immediately that what comes out of the camera and what I can make of it with editing are worlds apart. For the moment, I’m more interested in what I can do with the camera as a tool in itself. If I constructed the face in the mirror with editing, it would lose it’s impact to some degree, if one were aware of the fact.

Leslie,

I imagine photographers are like fishermen with “big one that got away” stories. If you only could have seen what happened outside “Terminal 1″ after I made these pictures and the camera was full!

We must stop meeting like this :-)