Back in the 70s Peter was swimming in the roiling waters of student life. Photography was ad hoc a part of his personal curriculum. "My original interest in it come from the same source that later led me to law school. The photography path led to the New Journal, a magazine, where I was one of the original photographers and ultimately photo editor," he wrote. Photography seemed to offer a way to address the dislocations that were going on around him. "Thinking youth regarded concern over social and political issues as paramount to leading a meaningful life."

The same upheaval was all around us both--marches, occupations, riots, tanks in the streets. But if I had a talent it was simply for presence, for being where I was and photographing it. I had no thoughts about doing anything meaningful. My interest was in what my photographs of things might look like. It sounds rather callow doesn’t it? If Peter was a thinking youth, I think I was not .

There were no early hints that I’d be any good at photography at all. In the beginning I took all the same crappy pictures that anyone else does--overexposed, obvious, done too soon. Really, I was just wandering around with a camera because doing so put me into a kind of relationship with things. It let me take impressions into myself and craft an image out of them, something that came out of me. In the beginning this was enough.

Somewhere I came across a book of the work of Andy Goldsworthy. He called himself a sculptor, though the term hardly seemed to cover what he did. He was a mind, an awareness that used what he found in nature to make works that might last only a few hours, weeks at most. He’d press red leaves into the cracks in tree bark and it looked like the tree was burning up in the middle of the woods. You could plainly see what he’d done, but the act of imagination was so great that seeing the mechanism didn’t diminish the effect. He’d break off icicles and stick them horizontally to a rock. He’d lay down when it began to rain, then jump up and photograph his rain shadow, quickly, before the continuing rain obliterated it.

This fast-decaying work persisted only in the photos he made of it, and the photos weren’t at all the point. The point--at least to me--was his getting in a state where he was free enough to even see such things. I had inched into that state a few times for a few minutes. He seemed to live there.

Well then, photography had changed. Photography had become freer, had fully taken its place among the arts. And I hadn’t followed.

End of chapter.

Art continued to change the realm of commercial photography. The pictures became the principal message carrier, full of implications and overtones. Recent example; clothed young man and nude young woman lying on a couch, murky lighting a mix of fluorescent green and dim end-of-the-world daylight. At the bottom a single word, the name of a clothing designer who designed...what? The clothes the girl has removed?

Things not said or shown are at the heart of this ad. If one were to ask a writer to write a one page story based on this image, the results could be rich, varied, possibly lewd, possibly hilarious, possibly sad, all based on the image, on implication, on a language in which "Like, y’know" has meaning. And that is the change in commercial photography--it goes past ideas, directly to the desires and works there.

The change parallels an earlier change in painting. Recall that famous remark, "From today forward painting is dead." In fact the only thing that died when photography was born was the requirement that painters represent physical reality. Now painting could deal directly with impressions, with color and line and energy. It slipped right through the optic nerve, past the intellect and right to the core. It was like music for the eye.

Photography took up the labor of physical description. The power of old photos, a lot of it, comes from the notion that they show just the way the Sphinx looked in 1848, just what Abraham Lincoln looked like, warts, wrinkles, ugliness and humanity. It showed reality, not interpretation--Brady’s Lincoln looks nothing like Gilbert Stuart’s Olympian Washington.

Showing what things looked like ;had become photography’s job, and thanks to a combination of influences like the Farm Security Administration, the Leica, WW II, and Life Magazine, photojournalism took the place at the head of the photographic table. And it was this kind of work--powerful, pervasive, and hugely popular--that reigned when I arrived in photography.

Peter, then a pre-law student, was arriving too. He says, "I identified discrete strands of photography that interested me. Social documentary photography, photojournalism; urban photography; portraiture So far as I was concerned the Greats were Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson. I thought of them as the icons of art photography as defined by my particular interests. But, for example I never took any serious interest in Andy Warhol."

Warhol was one of the influences that made photographers restive, made them want to stop being so depictive and slip into something looser. And though it was in the air when both Peter and I were coming into photography, it seems that we both missed it at first. For my part, photographic work I admired was work that made me think about particular things--war, social justice, visions of the American landscape and its inhabitants--by showing me them. Even the great Robert Frank took pictures of things, though they were enormously poetic.

But at some point I did notice the work of Duane Michals. He wasn’t Warhol, but he was a paisan of his, and his pictures made me think about how I thought about reality. Perception itself was his subject, as in a story by Jorge Luis Borges. Duane’s work--the sequences (in a few of which I appear as a blur), his portraits, even some of the early street work were about the way in which they shifted your perception to an unexpected point. They asked the question, "If things aren’t what they seem, what are they?" and then left one to mull over one’s own answer.

(When I finally met him I asked him whose work he admired, he said, "My own. I’m the only one dealing with the things that interest me." Whew, I thought, I’d never say that. But I came to understand better what he meant when I clarified my own working direction.)

Duane succeeded in the art world, but he was always quite active commercially. Sometimes his advertising projects were the sequences for which he was famous, and sometimes they were single images, vignettes full of hints and wit. Always they were well seen and well crafted. (Though not always admired. One social realist photographer referred to "Duane Michals’ little fables.")

So Duane bridged the worlds of commercial photography and fine art. My work looked nothing like his, but he loosened the bonds of my photographic thinking and let me peer out beyond my medium. There were other influences, but I’ll let Duane carry the flag for now.

End of chapter.

When I began photographing I was all questions, and photography was the way I tried to answer them. But as I slid into the commercial arena, questioning was pushed aside. I was given both questions and answers by my clients. All conclusions were foregone.

But the compulsion to ask questions never died (thank God) and the certainties of commercial photography kept irking the questioning part of my mind. That others felt this same conflict became clear when I began to have the same conversation over and over with various of my contemporaries--designers, illustrators, photographers, people who had achieved more or less what it was they’d set out to in our business or in another. They had their own agencies now, employees, health plans, had bought a bigger house, a Land Rover or a boat, or taken a long-delayed long vacation. They had filled all the places in their working lives, but still they heard that little voice inside that said, "What about meeee?", and they knew very well who was speaking.

That voice in me had only been quieted when I did what the artist does--not the showing of work, but the making of it.

And the hard truth is that that voice simply cannot be stilled by working in the commercial realm. The fact is that the media life must be flawless, even when it purports to be edgy. And those who make this work (me, you) are commissioned to make "visual solutions" that resolve all questions, and leave behind a no-seam surface. In contrast, the concrete of real life is filled with bits of straw and cheap materials and things that stick out. It’s shaky but it’s lively. And it’s the way things are.

The trick to invoking this life in art involves keeping the elements up in the air as long as possible, only letting them let them come down and drop into place at the last minute, so that they land in front of both artist and audience as a surprise, something that is both new and completely recognizable. The process leaves strings of implication dangling all around for the viewer to grasp and integrate. It’s like a kit with poor instructions and several pieces missing, and by assembling it the viewer has his encounter with the magic of art. To climb the long stairs at the Uffizzi in Florence and encounter Uccello’s incredible battle scene is to bring the awareness to life again of the energy of perspective that surprised even him. His thoughts disturb the air, right there where you stand, and you get to relive them, you have to. Same with Jackson Pollock.

By contrast, commercial work cuts off the possibilities and brings the conclusion to the front at once. You see it, you’re done.

I was at an awards show recently, walking around looking at the winning work. It was high-quality stuff, all of it well conceived, well written, beautifully produced. And the message of all this work--even the hardest-hitting public service ads, the most in-your-face commercials--was, "It’s all oka-a-ay!" It was like marketing Muzak.

Is it bad for the media to promise all this good? Let’s not be naive. Advertising is one piston of the economic engine of the world. We know its selling us and we even like it when it does. We just discount a certain proportion of what it says. Don’t you?

In any event we certainly don’t expect it to really reflect reality

But I don’t want to be sold and entertained all the time. I really want to know what’s going on in life, even when it’s not benign. So I read novels or see movies or plays with complex characters and conclusions that illuminate the difficult truths of life. I know that this ambiguity and difficulty is what that first spoke back to me through my own pictures. And when I turned to commercial work, the part that liked doing that didn’t have anything to do on the job. So it wound up saying dumb things like, "Does that arugula look too threatening?" It wanted to say something profound and, really, in the commercial context there’s nothing all that profound to say.

The impulse to know is central and deep. It prompts us to put things in our mouths and pull things off the table when we’re babies. It fuels our learning to speak, to read, to grasp math and experience music and art. It also makes us drive too fast and do things that are stupid. It’s part of what makes us alive! It is nothing less, and it doesn’t ever die. And if we don’t exercise it in some way, it festers and starts to hurt. For those who are inhabited by what Robert Henri called "the art spirit," it must be used.

So now here’s the toughest question in this article: if we neglect this spirit to do our commercial work, do we lose it? You’ll have to answer for yourself.

If we do, can we revive it? I think that the answer is that we can. But if we try we will come up really hard against the possibility that we’ve eroded our ability to make anything other than superficial work. When a commercial photographer returns to art, or an illustrator tries to really paint, he will almost certainly find that he wants to grasp for the solutions that have worked for him daily in commercial work. Early tries can tend to look rather like ads for something or other. Drop a marble on a smooth floor and the marble rolls the easy way.

So how can you cut a new groove? There’s a conceptual trick one can begin with. Imagine your creativity as being a vast space, full of all possibilities, with several doors into it. If a photographer approaches the door into this space marked Photography he is liable to find it clogged with all kinds of detritus–unexamined ideas, outdated techniques, "looks", dead habits. But if he simply walks around to some other door which he has never invested with his own need, he often finds that it opens to the slightest push and admits him inside, where the air is full of possibilities for music, images, colors, sounds and chants.

At this point he is back in where he wants to be, and he has the choice to simply see what’s there, or to wail, "Yes, but where are my photographs?" If he does that, he instantly finds himself outside again. He must learn to hang out in that space of just being aware and not doing what it is that he always does, doing nothing if need be.

For many years I have assigned the members of my classes to go out after the first lecture, look around, find someone interesting and write a one or two page biography of the person. "You mean talk to them?" they ask. I say, "No, just look at them and see what you know."

And they come back with the most extraordinary biographies, pungent, intelligent, insightful–and often extremely well written in spite of my saying that they should not be. At once the undeniable point is made that they have within them the insight to really plumb a person, intuitively and subtly. That’s crucial knowledge and a great affirmation. Once that’s clear it becomes possible to be on the move again.

(Of course if it were a class of writers I’d send them out photographing.)

So how does this technique of looking elsewhere help us to recover our first impulses? I wrote elsewhere in these pages about how I stumbled into writing, and how it revived me. Briefly, I took a class at just the right time, when I was ripe with need. And out of that class came an idea that might become a novel. "Should I pursue this?" I asked the teacher. She looked at me, astonished. "How can you not?" she said.

Working on it has brought back into my life such art-related things as difficulty in beginning, uncertainty about outcome, and so forth. But when something works there’s an exhilaration that’s just wild.

My first draft was interesting, but the protagonist was dull. He had potential, but he lacked something crucial. (Yes, LIFE! calls Lisette from beyond the grave.) Still, an agent saw the book and encouraged me to look further for the life of the character, so I dug back in. The second draft had lost 100 pages of fat and picked up pace. Agent liked it better, but the guy was still doing what I, acting as Dr. Plot, wanted him to. God, this was hard!

This story isn’t over. At present I’m working up to doing the next (the final?) round of hard work which I think know center on breaking the pervasive benignity that I’ve learned in making advertising. This, it seems, is where I will make my stand.