In January I read this review of books by Martin Amis and
Zadie Smith in the New York Times. I was struck by a sentence in which Amis opines on one of his
favourite authors, Nabokov. This is what hit me at the jugular:
“Writers die twice,” he observes in an essay on Nabokov.
“Once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.” Can we pinpoint when
a writer’s talent begins to fail?
My career as a photographer which I started in the early
70s in Mexico City began in earnest in Vancouver by 1977. From then on I bought
new equipment, new lighting and experimented at length with all kinds of
techniques. I was challenged to excell by very good art directors. I competed with other photographers for atention and for jobs.
Now at 75, obsolete, redundant & retired, am I in that
Amis category that my talent for portraiture has waned?
Personally, and by that I have to be subjective, I think
that my photography, no longer dictated by the desires of art directors is more
personal and edgy.
Are photographers like badly fixed b+w photographs and
destined to fade away in very much the same way Douglas MacArthur was the fate
of military generals?
I am currently shooting new stuff. But I am also looking
at old negatives (and in this case a b+w contact sheet of b+w 35mm pictures in
which I used Kodak Infrared film) and finding ways of re-interpreting my
initial intentions. Is this a mark of decline or of a late budding innovation?