Why?

Do you ever sit down - have a drink - and wonder why you take photographs? Do you come up with an answer?

It's the same question you can ask of any artisan or artist. Any writer. And the answer is similar to what you'd get if you asked a cab driver.

Cab Driver: I need to make a living.

Artist: I need to.

The fact that money is not usually part of the equation for the artist (and I should say - artist just means someone who is pursuing art at whatever cost to themselves - whether what they are doing is good or not which is a subject for another post).

So you have this artist who can't help doing whatever it is that they do do. The answer is elusive. I think we often fool ourselves by shallow answers such as: I just like it. Or I wanted to meet girls.

My answer. The artist lives an alienated life. It doesn't mean they are anti-social. It doesn't mean they don't have children and grandchildren. But it means that as life goes on, there is some part of them that is untouched, and that looks out at some distance at what is going on.

This "other part" can be emotional, or cool but it has that special ability to stand outside the individual and see or imagine things.

Art then - is some attempt to reconcile this internal schism in the artist. It is actually a survival mechanism for people so afflicted. That's where humor for some jumps into the picture, because they see the world as somewhat ridiculous - so they value those moments.

The next artist has a deep feeling of loss - of youth, of health - and tries to reconcile his own fragility by photographing robust images; or fragile and robust images in the same frame.

For some, the valued images are the opposite of the artists' lives. Their lives are messed up, imperfect, deeply flawed (just like everybody else) - and they look for perfection in the image. Sort of a reverse mirror of their own lives.

In other words, people don't go out and photograph or paint because of some artistic theory (yes they are aware of the theories and may use particular techniques) - but the underlying drive is not intellectual idealogy. It's an expression of trying to resolve and regenerate the schism in their own souls. Or to show this schism. Reconciliation with the reality they experience is momentary. Never fully healed. So they go on. Picture to picture. Novel to novel. Poem to new poem - hoping to find the secret key to unlock the door between their "separate part" and the rest of what we like to call reality.

Sedona Butte

(1995) I think this is called a butte. Maybe not - as I'm no expert on the southwest. But it was definitely a "spiritual power vortex" as they call them out in those parts.

3rd Avenue Fair 1.

This is a quote from Constantine's Sword by James Carroll about the time that Bob Dylan played before John Paul II.

"At the conlusion of Dylan's brief set, the pope went to the microphone. 'The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.' he said in his heavily accented English, quoting Dylan's legendary lyric. His Holiness defined the wind as 'the breath and life of the Holy Spirit.'

Then, as if justifying the presence of Bob Dylan and, not incidentally, defending Dylan's now renounced conversion, John Paul raised the epic question: "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" And he answered it: "One! There is ony one road for man, and it is Christ, who said, 'I am the Life'!"