Newport Beach, California

I hold no brief for any specific camera, technique, style, genre, school of thought, theory, etc. over any other. I hold, rather, with E. H. Gombrich's opening statement, The Story of Art: "There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists." All have truths to tell and, if strong, will work their singular ways, past tradition and contemporary trends, to the form which best expresses their respective truths. My job is to aid in this process.

The photographer Garry Winogrand told me, "Every photographer has two problems: To find what to photograph, and to find how to photograph it. The way I see it, you find the what, nail it to the cross, and the how will take care of itself." The photographer Andre Kertesz told me, "I do very little, really. Nature begins the [picture],  I see it, feel it, and complete it.” The photographer John Coplans told me, “All I think about when I’m working is how to make the strongest image I can.” The photographer Henry Wessel, Jr. told me,  "Usually it's the eye that leads the mind. But sometimes the mind leads the eye." The photographer Lee Friedlander told me, "I'm not doing anything different from what Atget did. It’s the world that’s changed.” Winogrand also told me, "Every photograph is a contention between form and content. One is always threatening to overwhelm the other. I like it best when content almost overwhelms form." And so on.

Which is the orthodox approach? None. Which is the correct one? It depends on the photographer. Perhaps none again, but yet some other, for example, some combination of the above, or of others; or perhaps an approach not yet tried. My job is to help each photographer find his or her way.

It helps if both student and teacher know what has been tried, both successfully and unsuccessfully. Hence the necessity of teaching and learning photography's history.

Photography is a visual art, i.e., a pursuit of beauty and truth, in various proportions the one to the other, and expressed in clear, accessible, permanent visual form. Only its physical means—materials, instruments, etc.--are specific to itself. Moreover, by virtue of these, there are only a few differences between a photograph, considered as a still picture, and still pictures made by other means, with other materials. Hence the necessity of constantly bringing into the discussion references to and examples from painting, drawing, and print making. The defining terms are always both “picture” and “photograph.” Walker Evans conceived of his style in part as a result of his having read Flaubert. His friend, colleague and occasional collaborator Helen Levitt developed her sense of form in part from chamber music, the productions of New York’s leftist Civic Repertory Theatre, and the jazz of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Robert Frank was confirmed in certain aspects of his by the jazz he heard, in the company of Franz Kline, at Greenwich Village’s The Five Spot, and specifically by the work of Ornette Coleman. Delacroix and Shakespeare and Goethe. Daumier and Cervantes. And so on. Hence my belief, and my practice based on it, that I must bring the other arts to bear upon my teaching of photography, and my constant exploration of them.

The expression of both beauty and truth via visual form depends on the artist’s handling of his or her materials and instruments, and this depends on his or her technical knowledge and fluency. Hence the necessity of teaching technique, and of knowing as much as possible about various techniques, so as to be able to help the student identify the technique(s) appropriate to his or her immediate aims—which, over the course of time, can, and often do change.

It also helps if both student and teacher can separate wheat from chaff, and, indeed, see the wheat for the chaff. Discourse is as crucial to this as looking. Hence the necessity of familiarizing students with criticism—the widest spectrum possible, and as disinterestedly as possible, lest any student adopt any one critical approach too soon, or an approach inappropriate to his or her work, or to the independent critical dialogue with one’s self and one’s art that every artist must carry on after leaving school.

The teacher, by definition, has seen, read, absorbed and contended with more pictures,  history, criticism, and theories than has the student. Also, at the beginning, the teacher’s eye is better. From this follow what I understand to be my two main responsibilities: 1)  To point out  a student’s weaknesses. 2) To help him / her see, discover, understand, and develop his/her strengths and originality. The second is the more important task. To a student’s eye, strength and originality can often look like mistakes, waywardness.  So I’m the one who must be able to say, "No, that’s your discovery, what you’re really seeing, feeling, the form that really interests you. The rest is just convention, something you’ve learned, i.e., an exercise.” This I learned from Winogrand when he told me that he inspected his contact sheets to find not the good pictures but those which interested him, and when, watching him select pictures for the book Stock Photographs, I saw him choose a picture he said he didn’t understand. “Maybe if I put it in the book,” he explained, “I’ll look at it until I figure out why it’s compelling, why it works as a picture.”

Louis Armstrong told the young, technically brilliant Roy Eldridge, c. 1928, "It's not enough to have great chops. You've got to have a story to tell, you've got to know how to tell it, and you've got to tell it." Charlie Parker wrote of his struggle to create his style: "I could hear it but I couldn't play it." With  a student who hasn’t discovered his story but whose pictures obviously contain  one, my task is, first, to point it out to him and encourage him to tell it, exactly as he feels it, and attend to “the how” later. With a student who knows her story but who can only sense, not express, her style, my immediate task is to show her how, and attend to “the what” later.

After all, it’s not my content or my sense of form that’s at issue, but the student’s.

Art teaching is mostly the offspring of two metiers: manual trade instruction and midwifery.

The rest is love.

In the late 1980s I withdrew from full time university teaching in order to concentrate on my writing and on the research for my current book project. I continued to teach privately, first with ex-students whose development interested me, and in short term workshops as visiting critic or lecturer, then in summer workshops at Manhattan's International Center of Photography.  By the late 1990s I saw that rapid, strong growth was possible with committed photographers working independently of university BFA and MFA programs.

These students, and others I had seen from the late 1980s on, also revealed to me that some of the strongest and most promising photography is being done by photographers working outside of the established US network of graduate schools and the art world.

Moreover, beginning with the early 1980s I have seen strong, original work by men and women of all ages, from various walks of life whose pictures I have seen during such experiences as teaching in US university continuing education courses, lecturing in the Middle East, or by chance: because a friend suggested I look at one of his friend's work, or that his friend show her work to me, or because a conversation begun at an opening, a lecture, an art fair, ends in "Why don't you show me your work?" or, "Do you think I could show you my pictures?" For many of these photographers, a few evenings' conversation, a ten-day seminar, three-to-six week summer workshops, or a semester's evening classes, yield only short-lived progress. Also, promising photographers rarely find artistic companions in these situations, and so fail to sustain the crucial critical dialogues between the photographer and others, and between the photographer and his/her work that are begun there.

And they're scattered far and wide, both within graduate schools and outside them. I have seen strong early artistic work from a photojournalist in Cairo, a graduate student in Seattle, a social worker on the Jersey shore, a nurse in Newark, a housewife in Queens, an illegal immigrant in Manhattan, undergraduates in Jerusalem.

Also, many have jobs and careers to sustain, and families to support.

The new world of distance learning enables photographers and teachers to discover and reach each other, its virtual environment makes sustained growth possible within the context of the photographer's other professional, family and personal commitments, and provides a way for photographers to contact each other and establish the kind of dialogue which, before the creation of the Internet, e-mail, instant messaging, affordable scanners and/or digital cameras was possible only in the concentrated environment of a graduate school or a big city with a strong and populous art world. And so, I've decided to recruit and teach by Internet.