dimanche 10 juillet 2005

Stay Hungry... Stay Foolish Steve Jobs - CEO of Apple - rounded off a speech to undergraduates, recently, by quoting the final words from the last edition of The Last Whole Earth Catalogue... "Stay hungry, stay foolish." Although I had a collection of those Catalogues for many years I can't say I remember those prophetic words at the time... I was more taken with the short passages, reprinted bottom right of every double-page spread, from Gurney Norman's "Divine Right's Trip"... my well thumbed copy always being in close proximity with Robert M Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." (Odd, when I think about it, that I've never driven a motorbike in my life... but in my sixties still own a VW Combi, or Transporter, depending on where you drive one). What I do remember at the time was leaving my job as a senior designer for an independent TV company in the UK. I guess it was a show of bravado... I had a job for life... dynamic industry... great pay... but wanted to be a photographer... and chose to leave on my 30th birthday. I didn't know it at the time... I thought I was being smart - but I was embarking on a life of staying hungry and staying foolish... for the rest of my life. One day in the next 12 months we won't even have a roof over our heads... the choice has been made to travel until we drop. There's a slow process of selling everything off... we can't take our goods and chattels with us on our grande promenade any more than we can take them with us when we drop dead. When everything is sold we're off into the yonder... stopping where fancy takes us... and no doubt photographing and writing about every stop on the way. The intention is to make a living on the road whilst we go... and although I don't find freelancing any easier now than when I gave up my "proper job" more than 30 years ago, I'll be happier behind a steering wheel than an office desk... and seeing a different face in a different market place rather than the same old colleagues in the canteen queue. When I look at the results of my very first freelance job in 1974 - photographing a then English-based American weaver, Elda Abramson, who was preparing an exhibition for the North West Arts Council in Manchester - I can almost remember taking every shot as if it were this morning. I can recall Elda, her accent, her hands working, the heat of the studio lights, the colours of the yarns she used in her sculptural weavings - the smell of the yarns too - and the gentle progress of her tactile art and craft. My contribution to her body of work was a monochrome photography exhibition... but my art and craft was almost instant. Shutter speeds of 1/125th of second froze her movements... my Nikon F2 cameras clicking noisily whilst her fingers and threads worked their magic silently. My silence was in my darkroom... just the gentle lapping of paper sheets being agitated in trays of chemicals... and the soft ticking of the luminous timer. When I look at my prints made thirty years ago they're as fresh as the day they were made... and I wonder how my future prints, if digital, will look in thirty years time... if I'm still behind a wheel and clicking away with a camera. It's strange to not know what I'll be using to make photographic images in the next decade or three from now... if I can accommodate the simplest of processing equipment in our future mobile conveyance - and all I basically need for hardware is a film developing spiral and tank - then I can probably continue to use my meterless Nikon F2 which will then be celebrating 40 to 60 years of use. And I'll probably keep my Leica M3, which is now nearing a half century of handling (in other hands as well as mine) and which will be working sweetly far into the future... something which can't be guaranteed with any battery, computer and computer programme dependent camera today. Given the rate of technological progress we won't even be using the ubiquitous DVD / CD most images currently get written to for long term storage... (remember the floppy... and the floppy floppy before that... and the SyQuest... and the Winchester... and the Zip)... and who ever transfers image files from their old storage device to their new one? Good stuff that old fashioned film... you can take a film negative made 100 years ago and print it 100 from now... no problem! I'm at the cusp between traditional and digital but cannot take that next step into using the new technology... I remain locked into an old, traditional system... and so will probably stay both hungry... and foolish. The full text of Steve Job's commencement speech to undergraduates can be found via Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment page. 11:20:14 PM    comment []