Unless I have the camera to my face, be it a 35 mm or an 8 × 10, I often simply don’t see the picture; the only way I have found to make good pictures is to make pictures. Many, many pictures. Most of them not very good. Then weed out the duds and start over again—like Penelope, deliberately unweaving, improving, making better work the next day.

still found something to say. Just as I always do, just as I believe I never will.

The unraveling and the uncertainty are part of the process, and, paradoxically, how well we can tolerate this uncertainty, how inexhaustibly we return to the loom (the looming loom?), will determine our success.

don’t always see bad work as holding the seeds of, or as being the road map to—whatever metaphor you want—good work. I see it as bad work. The shriveled lifeless seed, the pale blue dead end on a tattered old map. If perfection is the enemy of the good, it is also a surefire guarantee of artistic paralysis.

we realize that each time we revisit memories, real or imagined, the distinction between the two becomes less clear; the truth, or “something close to it,” becomes as mutable as our memories. Those memories, ambiguity-prone, recalcitrant, teasingly labile, are the unreliable scaffolding upon which we build our complex and unique story. Our one

As we tell our stories, with each retrieval we create our multifarious and unique individual self.

like most everybody, my memories are spotty, a whimsical tangle of synaptic threads, some elements showing up in vivid detail, others lost in the weave.

It could be entirely possible that you don’t even know what your story is until one day, maybe late in your career, you will realize how all the work you have made is tied together. Until that point, like a dowser’s flexible switch bending toward the underground water, you will find yourself drawn to your own subconscious aquifers of desire and

Intent is not enough. What matters is the quality of the work, the deftness and refinement of the execution, the applicability of the chosen form.