I have had lunch on most Fridays with my friend LeRoy now for nearly forty years. I never tire of our conversations. He's the friend of my life; I will never have another friend like him again. One of the reasons our friendship is so gratifying and durable is that we are very similar in some ways and very different in others. That makes for varied and unexpected conversations. One talk we had recently has accelerated my thoughts about why I take pictures. Actually we were talking about writing, and more specifically, writing for publication. He's a very good poet, who has had a book published and several poems published in journals. I don't write poetry, but I have written two books for middle school girls, one of which is worth reading - find it on Amazon if you like; it's called Spirit at Bear Lodge - the other one, not so much. I enjoyed writing both of them and have no regrets for the many months I spent on them. I worked for a couple years to find either an agent or a publisher for Spirit with no success. What I learned in my effort soured me on the whole publications game, which went deeper than me simply defending my bruised ego. I am a good writer, but I have no illusions that I am in the top one percent of one percent of the people who submit books to agents or publishers and who actually appear on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. I'm not and I am not for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that I want to have a life in addition to getting published. Every good writer - Kate DiCamillo comes to mind - made serious sacrifices to get to where she is as a writer. To be a successful writer, you have to decide early in your career to not do some of the things that are also important to you. Examples of things that I would have had to reduce or eliminate in my life are having a professional career, being involved in the defense of the planet and the vulnerable living things there on, contributing to my faith community, and even being a husband and father. You gotta make choices.
But I also discovered in my attempt to get published that you have to make other sacrifices I was simply not willing to make. First and for most you must reduce the quality of what you want to write in order to get published. By reduce the quality of what you want to write, I mean that you have to pay less attention to what you want to say and more attention to what agents and publishers want to sell. When agents tell you to write the book that only you can write, what they really mean is "You take all of the risks and I will take most of the profits of your efforts." Aspiring writers are told that successful writers spend ninety percent of their time marketing and ten percent of their time writing. Well, I want to write, not market and if that means that I will never get published then so be it. I am confirmed in my decision by the witnessing the tsunami of garbage offered up as writing that washes over me every day. I'm just not interested.
Enter LeRoy. He says that if I am not writing for publication then I am "just masturbating." The real hammer in his judgment is not the reference to masturbating which carries all of the life-hating, pleasure-hating viciousness of the worst of our culture. The heaviest rejection is loaded into the word "just." That word says that whatever is being evaluated - my writing in this case, or more precisely my intentions as a writer - are diminutive or somehow less than something else. Worthless. Pointless. Nugatory. (There's a good word. Look it up.) In LeRoy's defense, he says that my writing is brilliant and more of the world would benefit from reading it.
I am not persuaded. Not even a little bit. To elaborate on why, I turn to why I take photographs. Take this picture, for example:
I took this picture when I was driving east across North Dakota. I saw it sail by my field of vision and I knew right away that I wanted to get the image. I wouldn't have gotten it had I been traveling with anybody who valued their time. My dogs were with me, but they don't value one moment over another so I was good to go. In North Dakota, the opportunities to get off of freeways are rare. The reason for that is that for most people there are few reasons to get off freeways when they are driving across North Dakota. I had to travel for about twenty minutes to turn around, which means that I had to travel back another twenty minutes to get to where I wanted to take a picture. Then, since the image was on the other side of the freeway, I had to drive at least twenty minutes in the other direction to turn around to get back to the original spot where I had seen the image I wanted fly by me at seventy-five MPH. From seeing the image I wanted to pulling over to get that image was about an hour and a half. (See above about having to make sacrifices to be an artist of any kind.) Then, I discovered that a trucker had pulled his rig into the pull off, thereby ruining my image. It was a rest stop and he may have pulled over to nap for an hour or two. Fortunately for me, he got back on the road after about half an hour. Now I am over two hours of just getting positioned to take the photograph. I took a couple dozen shots and got back on the road myself.
So here is a picture that will never get published, except on this site. I think it is a good picture nonetheless. It is typical of one kind of image I like to make: stark, high contrast, minimalist, evocative, and, in this case, funny. Not everyone would be willing to apply those adjectives to this picture, much less characterize it as either interesting or good. And while I love praise and I value to evaluation of competent critics, I am fine if no one else likes it. My teacher Carl has taught me that some times artists have to accept that their audience may be an audience of one. To create the image you see above, I have given away about four hours of the few hours I will have in the light. I hope you like it, but if you don't, then I encourage you to move on to the next moment in your life. If no one likes it, well, frankly, I don't care. I want to contribute to the pleasure of other people. I want to make contributions to my own community and culture, but mostly I want to make images like this one, regardless of who sees it. I would do it even though I knew that no one would ever see it.
I didn't point out to LeRoy that only a tiny minority of the poems he will ever write will ever be read by more than a couple people. He might respond, reasonably, that the scores of poems he writes that no one will see make possible the poem that maybe scores of people will read. Nor did I ask him if he would write poetry if he knew that he would never be published. I knew him now close to fifty years ago and he was writing poems then. I am doubtful that he was writing for publication then. I am doubtful that he held the opinion then that he was "just masturbating". And, here's the thing, I know that he and I have actually masturbated in the past. All healthy people have. And we will probably masturbate again. We will do that even though doing so will be just masturbating. Without quotation marks. Why?
There are lots of reasons, which I will not go into here. My point is that I have many reasons for writing and taking pictures that are unrelated to either publication or anybody ever reading what I write of seeing the images I create. More on that in subsequent entries.