The first time I saw Jessie holding a candy cigarette, looking like something out of a 1920s Hollywood movie still, I knew there was a story there and I began corralling the supporting elements for a picture that I built as carefully as a mason knits together a stone wall. I returned to it over and over again.

we wanted freedom: no limits, no strictures, wide-open creative territory. And indeed, that was the landscape I explored for years, promiscuously taking pictures of almost everything that crossed my path, just for the sake of seeing what it would look like—in a photograph. And that is how it should be: Most creative people need a period, or a

The drawer pulls in the kitchen had been replaced by handmade papier-mâché flowers, and the burners on the white enamel stove were disguised, as if too utilitarian to be exposed, by flower-painted tin covers. On the refrigerator door, held there by magnetized (yes, you guessed it) flowers, was Vergie’s recipe (“very good recipe”) for homemade

Patience, it turns out, can be learned, and over a long period of time I have learned it. Patience, in conjunction with its sibling, tenacity, can take the place of … that other thing.

even though they were dumb pictures—and I knew they were—I kept taking them. Monkey at a typewriter. Sooner or later, there was going to be a good one, the monkey was going to get lucky, even if it was by accident.

naivete in art is like the digit zero in math; its value depends on what it’s attached to.

so you will be prepared to come roaring back when you have something unignorable and irrepressible to say. And you will.

So, all that aside, I still say to write your friends, write what you truly feel, but bear in mind that your letters in all their searing honesty will stand for you for all time. And it’s OK to look like an idiot, you are writing your friends, not a dissertation; don’t try to be anything but who you are. Tell the truth as you see it in that exact

to my mind, there’s a difference between an homage and a vampiric rip-off. In