OVER TIME THAT EFFORT BECOMES BREATH

berndt_houlilhansDoors

You know, I know already that I work my ass off to make pictures that (I fantasize) other people don’t see. I mean, I really try to see differently and photograph differently and render differently and find a perspective or point-of-view or a slab of light that maybe hasn’t been noticed, at least in the same way, by anyone else.

I always thought that, to be a real artist, this was what you had to do. To never repeat yourself, never compromise, to always start fresh without preconception or recollection, to avoid at all costs repetition and formula, to wake up every morning breaking new ground and creating from scratch.

As you can imagine, this makes for an exhausting life – especially in youth when the effort required to always strive for originality is constant. Only in age do I realize that over time that effort becomes breath, and the result is simply living, and it can no more cease to function than the lungs can end their involuntary expansion and contraction. The effort is oddly diminished as the habit confirms a life. And so the images grow more obscure, more confounding and cryptic, as the need for their existence becomes imperative, no doubt seen as even more accidental and unnecessary when revealed to the world.