Letters to Neil

I certainly wish I could work with nude models. I'm sure I could do interesting stuff. I don't want the kind of models you do; what I want are elderly and/or fat people, females by preference. For starters I'd photograph them in cheesecake poses. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure there are few women over sixty or seventy who'd be willing to go along with the gag. However, I'm quite serious about it – it's not just something funny to say. If I were really as Boho as I like to think I am, I'd have no trouble talking some people into it. But... As ever, my neuroses get in the way of accomplishing anything. (2/3/2004) Looking over my stuff, I think I have a number of good shots from the last six years, which is how long I've been (back) at it. Odd to see how few pix I was doing at first. Last year, with digital, 476 photos on my personal website, of which probably quite a few are keepers. As for amateur status, I take "amateur" in the 18th-century sense, in light of its derivation from the latin "amator" ("lover"), the amateur being somebody who does something for the love of it rather than for profit. Of course that argues a certain financial independence. The big writers and scientists, though not artists and musicians, of the 18th century were amateurs in this sense, usually guys who had inherited enough money to be able to spend their time collecting old manuscripts or fossils or writing poetry or satires or traveling around discovering new species. Actually earning money this way would've been considered being "in trade," a horrible blot on the old escutcheon. (They all had escutcheons.) (2/4/2004) As I get older (and older and older) I worry less about the correctness of my opinions. Have been reviewing the big new coffee-table book of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photos, probably the biggest collection of them ever printed. And I'm confirmed in the opinion I expressed to you before, that nearly all of HCB's work would, if published under another name, excite no comment and find no market. Certainly a handful of his pix, the thirty or forty most famous, are super-good, almost superhuman. But it would be silly to worship everything he did, since by far most of it is of only passing interest. Even more sadly, circa 1975 he hung up his Leica and went back to his first love, pencil and pen. The book reproduces lots of his drawings. Maybe I'm just a Philistine, but I don't see any talent in them. (2/5/2004)