Pixiq

The truth about creators of art is that no matter what anyone says, they pretty much are self-motivated and it's something they have to do.

Part I

Part 2

Photography Memoir 3 (my life in photography)

I've sat in poetry writing groups at college. I've been to film reviews in film school. And I've been involved with creating things, most of my life, and most of the time displaying them.

And the truth about creators of art is that no matter what anyone says, they pretty much are self-motivated and it's something they have to do.

Why do they have to do it? 

That's where it gets tricky.Maybe they'll find a gene someday that forces people to become artists. It's not an intelligent thing to do. The phrase "starving artist" didn't appear from thin air.

In other words, one thing I've noticed, over the years, is that no matter what you say to an artist, you won't be able to stop them. You just won't.

Either they enjoy it too much, or it helps keep them sane. Maybe they don't care if you like their work or not. Maybe they receive praise and enjoy that. But praise or not, money or not, there simply is no way to squash the artist anymore than you could catch a lion with your bare hands.

That desire to keep going is part of the whole equation. Or I should say, that desire to keep going while the mantle is upon you — that is part of the artist's personality. (See notes about Rimbaud below.)

I had been through hell. I've told a bit about trembling hands and typing tests, and working as a secretary and all that stuff; but let's jump ahead a bit. 

A few months after I took the job as a secretary at the PR firm, I quit and began doing temp work. I liked this much better, as I was sent from place to place and if I didn't like where they sent me, I would stay till lunch and then take off.

These were the early days of computer temps. I quickly became proficient using the hot programs of the day, such as Lotus 123 and dbase 3 Plus. For the first time in my life, I began to make money.

Photography was still a few years off, but I was writing songs and keeping a journal, and sure that something would come from all the crazy experiences I was having.

And there I was one day at an architect firm, two brothers who fought so much they bankrupted the firm, and I was at my desk when someone gave me a letter that was meant for the office manager.

It was a flyer for Columbia's Year and a Half Computer Course. It was the first time they were giving it.

And I found myself with my father one day, sitting on a hill looking at a lake, and I told him that if I took this course, it was going to be very intensive, and that I wouldn't ever do anything creative again.

(That's the point I was trying to get to.)

And he looks at me and tells me that I'll always find the time to do something creative. That he doesn't know what it is, but you just can't switch that sort of thing off.

And so I went from one world to another.

The film world was behind me. The writing world was behind me. I supported myself by floating from job to job doing computer stuff, and I enrolled at Columbia to study computer programming. 

These were ancient days. Compaq was a big name and in competition with IBM. The graphic environment hadn't appeared yet. At least not in the PC world.

And I spent a year and a half being tested almost every day at Columbia. Learning the language of the day, the C language… and how bits got flipped on and off. I remember that part of my final project was a menu system, still text-based, but starting to have dropdown lists, which I wrote in assembly language. Assembly language! 

Around this time, I thought that my father was wrong. I was now a programmer. That was my life. I lost touch with my friends from the film days and even with my best friend Lester that I used to write songs and movies with.

I'm jumping ahead a little bit. My first programming job was in Princeton — and that's a chapter in itself. I didn't do any photography that year.

That lead to my second programming job, which was for Liz Claiborne in New Jersey headquarters — this was a make or break deal for me. It hadn't been easy to get and I didn't think that I would ever do anything again other than write code.

I even convinced myself that code was poetry (as they say at wordpress).

Maybe it is, but it's not good at representing the human heart.

And it was around my third day there that they hired another guy, Jay, who would sit one cube away from me and hang a picture of the New York skyline up, tacked to his cube, taken from the Hoboken side where he lived, and with a camera that I had only dreamed of owning — the Hass. And we quickly became friends. And within three days of arriving at Liz C., Jay had loaned me a Canonet. This began my current phase.

The Canonet has one fixed lens. It's a rangefinder. And it had some nice features.

I believe it cost about $90 used at the time.

And I used that camera every day for about a year (it finally broke). And all these years later, pictures I took with that camera are for sale on my Web site.

Here's Night Bus (and remind me to tell the story behind this picture).

But the point is taken. You can't run away from yourself  You may try for a while, but if you are meant to be creative, there's not much you can do about it. Of course, for me, being torn between programming and photography would take a year of therapy and a good deal of anguish before I made the switch.

[It should be noted that I have known many artists who struggled with making money all their lives. But I don't know any true artist who ever just stopped because of the struggle. Now, I'm not old enough to have known Rimbaud, for example — but he comes to mind as someone who did his work before he was 20, and then went off to Africa where he did a bunch of stuff including slave trading for a while and as far as we know, never wrote poetry again. But that was his choice.]