The Greatest Days from A to Z: It is All About The Day and Edward Curtis

I have lectured about my photography. I always consider what I should talk about when I prepare a lecture about my photography. I always consider who I have photographed. I always consider where I have been. I always consider the experiences I have encountered. I know that people are attending to listen to what I might say about my history: They want stories.

I reflect on the thousands of portraits and the thousands of architectural designs. I stare at my archives. My mind weakens. My heart pumps. My ideas disappear.

I do have a failsafe method to recall what I need to say, what I want to share: I playCharades with myself. It is never about the words, names or places. Charades begins when a piece of celluloid or a printed image appears before my eyes. My memories shift into overdrive. I laugh full throttle. One single visual image triggers a line of thinking that on any given day can travel from a day when I was two, to a dream that I may have had and forgotten many years before.

I love the visual arts. I have seen millions of images from every medium. I adore a great handful of photographers. The image and the story that transports me across my photography universe, is from Edward Curtis’s Monument Valley series. The “Canyon de Chelly- Navajo”. The image is not even his best. But when I first saw it as an eighteen year old, I knew that was the life I wanted for myself. I wanted to be the one who made that photograph.

1904 was a bit before my time. But that image has penetrated my heart like few others. It told a story through the narrative of not just the location, but the techniques of photography. This eighteen year old boy was hypnotized. I wanted to be the one who made something that takes your breath away that steals something from your soul.

What Curtis really accomplished for me was something very simple and simple in a way that many photographers strive to do: He showed me the way to introduce my world through my photography.

I did not have any interest in recreating scenes like Curtis did. I wanted to capture what I saw in the moment and allow the spaces to speak for themselves. Curtis had a bit of the fabrication in his shots. He re-imagined the ways of the Indians. But most importantly for me, he was where the photograph needed to be made. I wanted that feeling of “being there”.

My architecture, my artists, my places are archived by my history. They represent a bit of my needs to be here, there and everywhere. It breaks my heart every time a place is demolished (Like the recently demolished Nakagin Capsule in Tokyo that I luckily did get to photograph) or a person or place is taken from the earth before I can make a picture that should not be missed. If an opportunity to make a moment is lost, I feel a bit lost. I feel as if I had not made the memory, made the effort to see what my camera needs to see.

I love photography, but there are times that I believe that it is not that the photograph matters so much;

It is the life that matters.

That is why Curtis’s Monument Valley image matters so much to me: I wanted to be there. I wanted to photograph my own monuments, my own valleys.

So I race. I race some more. I race until there will be no more breath to inhale. Then I snippety snap snap and allow the story to begin. I gather myself to discover another place and time. I continue to look for the valley, the image that stirs my heart and my imagination.