Why I Take Photographs

It all begins with a long breath, whssssped in as soon as I hit the street. A deep inhalation, air lifting my nostrils, tilting back my head, focusing my eyes—my eyes zeroing in on everything in front of me. My head clears and I start to not simply see the street in front of me, I see a flow of shapes, forms, colors—I begin to see possible photographs. 

There’s not going to be a good photo between me and the subway a block away, well, there almost never is, but as boy scouts still tell us, preparation is all—and I’m prepared. I pull my camera from its bag, drape its leather strap over my neck, take off the black lens cap, turn it on, check a few settings … and then I start looking even harder.

“Camera-seeing,” is one way I describe it, and being in camera-seeing mode is a main reason I take photos: to have a good reason to slip into this heightened, focused, eyes-swinging-side-to-side, nothing-gets-by-me (I hope), all-consuming mental state. I’m no longer just a regular person walking down the street, I’m all in the street … and yet I’m not. It’s a funny presence, you’re walking—and dodging passersby, missing dog leashes, avoiding broken sidewalk—but you’re also floating above the actual street life, that buzz and thrust, enveloped in an artful nonparticipation participating, watching the street, pushing consciousness out into it, and of course waiting … always waiting. The point is to be out there in the street, yet not fully part of it; aware enough of what you’re doing, where you’re going, but even more aware of possible photos. When everything’s working, I’m all eyes (and let’s hope quick reflexes), and if I Zen-out into the sunlit morning just right, that’s all I am. I see just what’s in front of me, what my camera might capture; the rest of the world—personal worries, what to have for lunch, all the quotidian pleasures and trials—is ignored. 

I’ve written novels what seems like all my life, so I’m pretty good at both being fully in a moment and yet away from it. When writing, you have to follow the flow of the story, typing like mad, yet also always asking if what your fingers are getting down is right, belongs. As I tell my writing students, you have to be like a hummingbird’s wings, one wing creating, the other wing cutting back what you’ve just written; and you have to do this so fast it’s a blur.

Taking photos is similar: I have to see something, judge whether it might make a photo, try to grab the flow of the street-moment so the shutter pops at just the right millisecond, then ask myself if there’s another photo about to come. (A few quiet moments later, I look at the shots on the back of my Fuji, and mostly call myself an idiot and delete a bunch—or now and then say to myself, Hmnn, that one could work, and keep it till later. More on this to come.)

The point for now is that for me the greatest pleasure of photography is slipping into this heightened state, this artistic high, and being lost to it. I like it there. When I have my camera around my neck, almost every day I do, I’m in this special place. I don’t take drugs, haven’t since when as a kid I gave being a hippie a go, so my high is this heightened state of photographic possibility. It works. It’s fun—and pretty damn cool, too. 

Yet I’m not taking pictures just to get a buzz on. I’m after something bigger, grander, more startling. I’m chasing art.

So, contra social media, and maybe a little old-fashioned (and yet as new and cool as the vinyl record resurgence), I’m working to accumulate a body of photos that will end up in a book. They’ll be offloaded from my Fuji, then edited in Lightroom and Photoshop, dragged into folders, pulled up again in Lightroom in potential book groupings, and then chosen and unchosen, ordered and reordered, as I work toward the string of shots that will make up a physical book. 

I’ve always thought any art (paintings, books, music, etc.) was special, and took a lot of time and work. I’m wary of the seriousness of anyone simply feeding their Instagram account, though I’m also open to a strong body of work coming from anywhere, any which way. 

Still, I have my way of working—don’t we all—and I believe it works for me. The start is taking pictures on the street, the ending is a physical book somebody can enjoy and appreciate.

So how do I get there? 

Often before a day’s camera-wandering, I pull a photobook from my shelves, not really to learn anything further from it, really just to use it as a touchstone, the way a sports team will all pass hands over a totemic bat or helmet on their way to the field, to orient myself, get focused, tell myself I’m on my way out the door to do serious play, not of sport but taking pictures.

One photobook I’ll look at is a big, fat glob of Daido Moriyama. I look at his photos for a few reasons. One, they tell me anything’s possible; and two, they suggest that an awful lot of photos can pile up and still make a great photobook. Not all of his shots are gems, but all of them are all his. 

Not mine, his. All his.

Daido always reminds me: Be true to yourself, your own vision. Make every shot you take your own.

Another totemic book, perhaps my most often touched on my way out the door, is Photographing America, a collection of shots by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans of just that: America. The book is literally a touchstone: I run my hands through its pages, look at some of the photos I know so well, using them to jog my mind just a little—to get me thinking, These are good photos, deeply telling, well-composed, and ultimately America-defining. 

Indeed, much of what I’ve done, in photography as well as my fiction, is to capture America; and many of the artists I like best are those who, in their singular ways, have done just that: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Bob Dylan, Jackson Pollock, Edward Hopper, Emily Dickinson, Bruce Springsteen; and photographers such as Robert Frank, William Klein, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, and Saul Leiter. 

Of course most of these are white men, but they’re also indisputably our forefathers, and if what I’m after as I head out on the streets is to take my photos in the first portion of the 21st Century, these souls create a solid grounding (as well as, I hope, deep inspiration). If Dylan is inspired still by Woody Guthrie and Child ballads and the old Testament and Homer, well, you take your strength from wherever it comes.

Again, it’s not that any one photo in Photographing America directly inspires me, it’s just a head-turn, a way to set each step from that moment on toward the point of adding to that photographic canon: Photographing America.

And also to get me out into the street. To take street photos.

When I first got excited about taking photos, I realized I wanted to do what historically has been called street photography, so I read Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck. I wanted to know where the work I was interested in taking on had been, so I could figure out where I could help make it go.

I learned a lot, got a lot of ideas, but the more I looked into the whole idea of being a street photographer in our decade, the less I liked the sound of it. It was like trying to be a rockabilly artist, say, a doowop group or a synth band: Years back it had been discovered as something fresh and new, moved the world, and now it was close to nostalgia.

Which posed a challenge. I wanted to take photos as I flaneured around the city, camera in hand, but I didn’t really want to be a street photographer. I mean, I’d love to have been Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Bruce Gilden, or Meyerowitz when they were the only guys standing out on Fifth Avenue waiting for photos to stroll on by. But that was fifty years ago. And as another great (if unreadable) American writer put it, You can’t go home again.

The thing is, Fifth Avenue is still there, bustling, teeming, and there are still good pictures to be pried from its wide sidewalks. Indeed, the other week, as I was talking past the corner of Fifth and 42nd—OK, lingering there, camera ready, for five, ten minutes—I saw another guy with his camera doing the same thing. What did I think? Garry Winogrand is dead, dude! What did he think of me? I didn’t stick around to ask.

You can’t go back … but again, the streets of New York are still pulsing with new life, new drama, and photographs eager to be taken. 

So I wouldn’t think of myself as a “street photographer.” I’d just go out on the street and take photos. 

Aside: I’m not alone. Here’s Winogrand on being a street photographer: “I hate the term. I think it’s a stupid term, street photography. I don’t think it tells you anything about a photographer or their work.” Also from Winogrand, always a fount of photographic wisdom: “I don’t think about pictures. When I photograph I see life. That’s all there is.”

Truth is, I also couldn’t do it the way it had been done before. No one’s ever going to top the Cartier-Bresson photo of the man behind the Gare St. Lazare in Paris, leaping past a ladder floating in shallow water, his reflection perfect below him, the leaping dancer on the sign behind him a true mirror image; or Winogrand’s shot outside an American Legion convention in Dallas, a legless man pulling himself along by his hands as Legionnaires stand by indifferent … those perfect moments of composition and magic somehow put onto film by the fastest, best eyes in the biz. 

I can think of dozens more street shots never to be excelled. But I wanted to at least try. But I also do not want to take those photos again—they’ve been done. 

* * * * *

So how to do it? What can I add to the canon? What at bottom am I up to?

Large questions, and if for starters I didn’t have that much of an idea, I found I did intuitively discover some dos and don’ts.

For one, I’d shoot in only in color. Why? I love black-and-white photography, Atget, Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, Frank, Klein, et al, but for my own work I like color best. I think it adds another dimension, or at least another challenge: If at times, it’s a climb to make a shot work in color, well, start climbing. Make any photo I take work in color. On the other hand, I’m interested in the play of colors. I like Mark Rothko a lot, and mostly what he does is drop two or three blobs of color on a canvas … and the whole room glows. That’s a game, the way colors interact in a rectangle, I want to play. Plus, it’s a lot easier to do color work than it used to be. Shooting digital, you don’t have to go into the darkroom; owning a decent Epson or Canon printer, you don’t have to pay through the nose for high-quality prints. 

In a piece on William Eggleston in Aperture, John Jeremiah Sullivan talks about the advantage that Eggleston’s wealth brought to his photography: Simply put, once Eggleston discovered the beauties of dye-transfer color prints, he was fortunate enough to afford them. Not a small advantage, as I recall my first serious work in photography back in the all-analogue days, and as I lived my starving-novelist life in my East Village tenement, quailing at the cost of even a barely adequate large color print. 

With digital, shooting color is as easy—way easier—than old-school film black and white. An interesting fact: The classic black-and-white film photographers out on the street, Winogrand, Friedlander, Bruce Davidson, et al, reportedly shot lots of color film, they just couldn’t afford to print it. (That was Eggleston’s great patrimony as an artist: Not just artistic genius and a nonpareil eye, but enough bucks to print those color photos any way he wanted.) Now we see books of their color shots, and a magnificent show of Winogrand color slides recently at the Brooklyn Museum, pictures in ways as striking as the ’50s, ’60s black-and-white work. But they—and certainly I—couldn’t get good color prints back in the Kodak days. 

Now I can … and that’s what I shoot. Black and white? Somehow for me flipping a switch in Lightroom to make my digital color shot black and white seems too easy, though Lightroom makes everything pretty easy anyway. So maybe it’s mostly a question of what kind of photos I want to take, and which photos I love most of all.

* * * * *

Another intention for me: Don’t be noticed. As I go out walking with my camera, I’m not an Anders Petersen or Bruce Gilden; I don’t feel comfortable talking to strangers, asking if I can take their picture. I like to shoot on the fly, often with my camera only hip-high, grabbing shots as they come, whoever’s in the frame (I hope) oblivious to what I’m up to.

I’m pretty good at picking up on what people on the street are paying attention to. Anyone on a smartphone is not paying attention to anything but their own digital daze, and as I said above, that makes them fundamentally uninteresting. I find it’s a fairly rare person who even knows I’m looking at them, thinking about taking a picture. But I do occasionally find truly street-smart folk who know exactly what I’m thinking, what I’m up to. I can tell, read it in their eyes, their gestures. 

It’s that awareness, that consciousness that I’m there that I don’t really want … unless it makes for a good picture.

I think of Robert Frank’s shot of the couple in Dolores Park in San Francisco as one of the strongest in The Americans, the man in the picture looking back and glowering furiously at the photographer. Did Frank expect that? Probably not. Did the man say anything? And how fast did the photographer get out of there? 

I’ve only gotten yelled at, “Hey, what’re you doing, don’t take my picture!” a few times over the years, so I think I’m pretty good at slipping about unnoticed. Only once did somebody actually start after me, shouting, “What are you doing? Are you taking pictures?” but things were busy and I scooted away. Don’t look back, as Dylan’s movie has it, and I didn’t.

I’ve also taken pictures where it looks as if somebody is gazing right down the barrel of my camera, even though as I took the shot I was sure they had no idea I was there. Who knows what was going on with that? But ideally, to quote another Dylan song, when I take a street picture, I’m not there. 

At bottom, all that should be present is a human consciousness, a soul, in concert with a camera, ready to be arranged into a composition resonant and telling, with a quick-enough spark of energy to bring all meaning, implication and metaphor together in a telling visual moment, one that becomes fixed as an image, then edited, printed on paper, put into a book. 

What does the prosaic I have to do with that?

* * * * *

Do I have rules for what I do? Well, I talk about a bunch of them in a piece later in this book, written four years after this essay, so I won’t go on much here. Let’s say that instead of rules I have intentions, and ideas, things I’ve thought up over the years. 

The most important: Always take along a camera. Everywhere. You can’t take photos without having a camera. I know, Duh. 

More ideas. A few don’ts, for starters. As I said, no shots of people on their phones, if I can help it. I’m wandering the streets to capture (at best) people’s souls. Look around, it doesn’t take much to discover that anyone peering deep into their smartphones is, at least in that moment, essentially soulless.

Another don’t: no panhandlers or homeless people. At least not straight up, as in taking advantage of anyone’s misery. 

But other than that, subject matter is wide open. It’s simply what catches my eye, and that which I in turn can capture in my camera. Essential subjects can be people, lights, patterns, striking details, or redolent cryptic blurs—or a mixture of all the above … in essence, any photo that captures, or at least teases, the idea behind the title of this volume: The Mysteries of Light.

The eye is all. The seeing. The awareness. The floating along both in the world and outside it.

Oh, and one more absolute rule: Always be interesting.

This is what I go for in the novels I write, and what I always tell my students. You’re not really writing for yourself, you’re writing for others. 

So, be interesting.

How does that work in my picture taking? Interestingly (I hope), it’s tied in with the kind of Zen state of walking down the street ready to take pictures, flashing the shutter button, then … well, pictures are immediate these days, they turn up on the back of my camera after pushing a button, so I can see how well I did.

Idiot! Loser! Fool! I’ve shouted these imprecations at myself, coming so close to a good picture but just not getting it. If I’d just been a millisecond faster, got my camera down a few fractions of an inch, not simply seen the picture, but as a pitcher eyeing the strike zone, actually delivering the ball where it had to go … that could be me, going all Mark Fidrych on myself, screaming in my head at my camera for having thrown a dead-on strike.

But the above paragraph is just the harsh editing part of my brain, the one that’s always alongside the blithely creative one, both working simultaneously. I’m taking the picture, then judging it, all at the same time. I’m creating and devouring. I’m attempting something and failing … or maybe coming through. 

It’s a curious mix of consciousness, being psyched up one second, then seriously frustrated the next. But for me it’s part of taking pictures, and in the search for the perfect shot, an uplifting part at that.

Because if I’m trying to be the best photographer I can, I can only be that if I easily and casually condemn any work that falls short.

Inside the work and outside it. You have to be both, in the same microsecond, success and failure flapping as fast as that hummingbird’s wings. 

Then one way or another, for better or worse, what I just snapped is what it is … and I’m on to the next shot.

* * * * *

The more I take pictures, the more interested I become in capturing a kind of magical realism, the sort of thing Gabriel Garcia Marquez did in his novels so wonderfully a number of decades back. As I see magical realism in photography, it’s imbuing a photo taken on the street (reality) with qualities far beyond what we think of as real. I have various techniques I’ve stumbled upon, often using purposeful mis-focusing, sometimes using reflections off of buildings, sometimes using forms of glass before the lens, sometimes doing things with my Fuji camera I can’t even explain. (As I’ve said, often that ol’ Fuji has a mind of its own; I’m constantly surprised by what it decides to do with whatever I thought I was up to.) 

The results are to make street photographs that don’t at all look as if they were taken on the street, or at least any street anybody knows. It’s my own private place, somehow rendered through a camera.

Sometimes I call what I come up with Impressionistic, sometimes Expressionistic, sometimes stream of consciousness … well, I really don’t put any labels on my work, these are just words and phrases that sometimes flit through my mind. It will be interesting to see what critics will come up with to explain what I do. I’m sure it’ll be something. And then I’ll have to disown whatever phrase or allusion they endow me with. 

Because whatever it is, it’s not what I’m thinking when I hit the street. Usually what I’m thinking first is, Where do I want to go for lunch? That quotidian question often determines where I go out shooting each day. Yep, just that. That’s the secret to my work: Where to have lunch. Oh, and my other secret: I don’t know anything about cameras, can’t begin to compare lenses or aperture settings or anything like that. I’m a novelist, not a trained photographer. I use one camera. It does weird stuff all the time. 

And yet somehow it all comes together in the flow and flitter of my photobooks, the images cascading upon each other, the colors flying, the magic (I hope, I pray) rising off the pages.

That’s why at bottom I take pictures. I do it to capture a whiff, a slant of light, an emanation of magic. 

The novelist John Irving once told me that one had to do something each day to “redeem the day.” He said that writing well would do that for him (and it’s done it for me, too), but if the writing didn’t go well, he’d make a good meal … yes, a simple but loving meal could redeem the day.

So can taking a good picture or two. Capturing an image no one has ever captured. Building a book not like anybody else’s. 

At bottom that’s what it’s all about: a way to redeem each and every day.