Letter To A Young Photographer

Here's your next assignment. Do the Mario Testino thing. Omar told me that Testino said to him, "You know why I make millions doing this, you know why? People think I'm some amazing photographer. All I do, I make the clothes look really good."

What I'm trying to say is get at what is elemental about your subject. If she's not drop dead gorgeous, either make her so, or concentrate on her character. Or on her clothes, or her sex, or her doubts and hopes and the miracle of her becoming a woman. Make everything real, and really amazing. If there's an ounce of contrivance - just like in acting - the whole thing's shot.

So when I look at this shot I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be amazed with. And I shouldn't be thinking about that. My disbelief should be suspended and I should be swooshed into your world. Your light is clean, but to what end? Remember, if you're going to shoot fashion, it has to be a revelation of how we see the world. And if you shoot a portrait it's a revelation of how you see a soul. Rock? Everyone's a Rock God. Stella Adler says we go out to eat to be served, when we could just as easily feed ourselves at home. We go to the theater to be served emotion, though we get it everyday in real life. We view pictures to see God. Everyday is Sunday when you raise that camera to your eye. Everything is holy, and perverse. The sky and the very bottom of your churning bowels. The Light and The Dark. We go to photography to See, to verily see, despite the eyes in our heads. To spite the eyes in our heads.....

Remember, I say all of this as much to you as I do to myself.

Full Steam for '08

Each day the feeling mounts that I'm gifted with a life at the pinnacle. Everything is so good, marvels and magics and each day imbued with fineness and silliness that makes all the quotidian of my life picaresque. Every thing's a tale in my existence. My incredible family and our city farm, the burgeoning career handed to me on platters with a gift that comes easily and it's all as if it were inscribed to be nascent. The glow of the lights that so rarely leaves me. And the overarching awareness that so many others have it so vile at this very moment on the face of the earth. The substance and consequence of hope and desire and compulsion and compassion and maturation and nurturing are the same, the sun rises, even through muck in the sky, and it feels like a new day - for all of us - but the possibilities are commensurately, exponentially, more flowering for me. And thus I try, with each of the wonderful new days, to be as reverent as I am gleeful. And I try to not steer from that glee as an act of reverence. Thus I am a faithful man, committed to the gift of my birth at this most amazing place and time. I do like gifts, and this's a good one.