So Many Cameras, So Little Time

Originally Posted Monday, September 8, 2014

I'm dying too much tonight.  Time is limited and my desires are limitless.  I return to the factory in the morning.  It is the last thing I wish to do.  I want to go places and make things.  I could.  It would just take a much larger sacrifice than when I was younger.  Only a few years left and I can retire with quite a pension.  Only I will probably be dead or worse.  If I could, I would load the truck and head out on the highway.  I would see what there is to see without the big attachment to. . . the safer, brighter future.    People find it easy to tell me to pack it all in, sell everything, and forget security.  There is no such thing, they say, though we all know the difference between the retirees on the golf course and those in the grocery store alleyway.  Still, even friends have the audacity to say that I should give it all up and live, whatever that means.  The ones who tell me that will all be at work tomorrow, of course, and they will see their therapists in the afternoons.  They have doctors appointments to get their skin checked for cancer, their colons, too.  They get regular checkups and see heart specialists.  They have children growing and grown. 

I will be at the factory to take the daily beating. 

My cameras sit in bags.  The Mamiya 6 and the Bronica medium format SLR and the Sony a7s and the Canon 5D and the Leica M7 and the Leica R 5s (2 of them) and my Leica CL and my Voigtlander R and my Nikon D700 and the myriad Nikon film cameras.  I have a hundred lenses and many 4x5 cameras and even brass lenses, and I have an 8x10 Toyo view camera.  I have the famous Black Cat Edition of John Minnicks' famous Aero Liberator, the 13th ever made. 

I drove to one good and one very good gallery today.  I want to pitch my stuff.  Both were closed.  But I drove in places I don't usually drive, and boy was I excited to go out and take some street pics. 

All it takes is guts.  And time.  Lots and lots of time.  And, of course, to know what you want to say.  That is the hardest part. 

I am not a professional photographer.  I don't want to be.  I don't want to do weddings or events or corporate portraiture.  People do that to make a living.  Many are good.  I just want to tell stories.  I want the thrill of meeting someone and asking if I can take their picture.  It is a terrible thing to want to do.  I meet women for the first time in my studio and ten minutes later we are trying to make up a story. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it.  Events conspire to keep me from doing even that now.  I shouldn't let them, but I do.  But shit. . . there is a world out there to explore.  

I want to buy this camera and this camera and maybe even this camera, too, to tell stories--I think.  I shouldn't.  But I might.  Anyone have some spare thousands?  

I will, though, take four big framed prints into those galleries and see what they say.  I think they should fall over themselves wanting me, but if not. . . they are stupid.  And if either of them wants the pictures, I am going to try to leverage myself into some other things I want to do, too.  I'll have credentials.  And if not, I may try anyway.  

But chances are, nothing like that will happen.  I will get up and go to work and then I'll go to the gym and I'll come home tired and cook dinner and drink a bit and fall asleep exhausted, but I will not sleep, and then in the morning I will do it all again.  

All things conspire against the uncertain artist.  God made a lot of cameras but not so many good photographers.