Film, Digital, and Paradoxical Simplicity

One of the allures of film is that in its relative simplicity, there is supposed to be some tighter connection between the scene before the camera and the recorded image. The lens impartially draws on the film, and that’s it (not really, but let’s pretend). This stands in stark contrast to the computational photography creeping steadily into digital capture, particularly in the case of phones. All sorts of digital magic goes on behind the scenes: compositing images, automatic "best" selection, massive distortion correction, post-process background blur. It’s all very complicated, and if you’re of a certain mindset, it reduces the authenticity of the final image. The traditional camera, by contrast, is supposed to be more like a human eye, with its organic lens focusing light onto a retinal film and none of this digital trickery. What could be more perfect, more true, than the very organs with which we see? Would that it were so simple.

Things were simpler, better, before.

The dichotomy that sets the purity of film photography against the artifice of digital capture overlooks the fact that vision itself is a tremendously elaborate and notoriously unreliable example of computational imaging. What we “see” is disturbingly detached from the photons that hit our retinas (retinae?). It's dependent on the way our brains put together flickering nerve impulses as the eyeball saccades around the scene and melds multiple moments with preconceived schemas to form an illusion of continuous, coherent vision.

Consider the classic Harvard study in which subjects watched a video of people passing balls around. As they carefully tracked a ball, half the participants failed to notice the man in a gorilla suit who sauntered across the screen. So much for the reliable fidelity of our built-in cameras.

So the human eye is more an eye-Phone than a classic L-eye-ca (oh yes, I did that). But maybe it's film's divergence from the eye rather than any parallels that justifies our attachment to the impractical and antiquated. Human vision is complex and unreliable. Much like a smartphone, much like the world. And digital photography, which is as much about computers as optics, suffers from the fundamental opacity common to so much modern technology: nobody understands it.

No single body, I mean. As a product of humans, of course “we” understand it. But consider the thousands of minds, the millions of lines of proprietary code, that go into a smartphone. Could any one human really know, end to end, how the thing works? Of course, most people (myself included) don’t fully understand all the optical principles of a multi-element lens or the chemistry of light-sensitive emulsion, but we intuit that with some reading, a substantial but totally human amount of effort, we could. And this lets us feel more in tune with the technology, more aligned with it as we use it. It’s a tool, like a sharp stick, not magic. Magic, despite its appeal, has a dark side. They burned witches, you know. And they burned David Copperfield. Or if they haven’t yet, David, you better watch your back.

Digital natives performing strange rites. The smart ones may one day recognize the poison of convenience, the corruption of algorithms that presume to create an idealized memory of a fictional moment. Whose ideal? Whose moment? Get off my lawn.

Perhaps it's digital technology's transformation into a subjective, active partner in image making that's freshened analog photography's appeal. Digital, having largely achieved the goal of total fidelity that photography has aspired to since its inception, is now trying to out-think us. We want what we remember, or wish we remembered, whether it was there or not. This is how human vision and memory already work, after all -- the perpetual golden hour light of childhood afternoons half-cribbed from old movies, the moment when everyone laughed that never actually happened.

And to some extent, this is what all photography does. The moment of family bliss caught in the frame is what carries forward across the years: the sulking and hair-pulling that bracketed it are allowed to fade. But film, when you understand it, feels more dutiful, more reliable, perhaps more beautiful, with its opto-mechano-chemical process that affords no judgement in the moment. Once the shutter is tripped, a chain of events rooted in the physical world leads to an image hiding in the film emulsion, waiting for developer. It's magic, but it's a small, predictable magic. Nothing you're likely to burn for.    

Splitting Utility and Passion

Many of us, maybe most of us, are attached to things, care about things. We pick up our carry-ons when exiting burning airliners, which isn't really the same but makes a nice metaphor. The folly of materialism has been well explored and you should probably spend some quality time considering it. But for now, let's consider cameras.

I've owned some half-dozen digital cameras since the new millennium dawned. Each one (except the first, which fell into my lap like a careless match flicked into a barrel of oily rags) was hotly anticipated, greeted with great excitement. Each was fawned over, imbued with an importance that felt durable, fundamental to its qualities. And despite that, each was eventually set aside (save the last) in favor of something "better" for what I imagined my photographic project to be. Anyone with a digital camera history can guess at what got me excited: the ability to work with a paucity of light, to focus faster and more accurately, to record more detail. It all sounds kind of silly now, but that's not the point.

This progression, from torrid passion to dismissal in favor of the new thing, is something that I suspect is hardwired into our primate selves. Consumer capitalism has made a fine art of exploiting it, fanning the flames of desire for the next shiny thing with surgical precision, to layer cliches.

One of its favorite techniques is something I’ve seen referred to as the "demotion effect," though I googled this and couldn’t figure out if the term is in wide use. Regardless of terminology, you’ve almost certainly experienced it. You get a new thing, and you're happy. It’s the best thing! All the reviews say so! Then they make a new new thing that's nominally better, and your now-old thing, which hasn't changed since yesterday, suddenly seems less capable. You were happy with it before, but now you're not. And we all want to be happy. The solution is obvious. The very temporary solution.

It's easy to imagine how much "better" your photographs would be with a "better" camera. The bitter but also beautiful truth is that the only substantive upgrade is "no camera" to "camera." (Be sure to picture my air quotes as you read.)

The crazy thing is that, as with a lot of these primate deep-brain twitches, knowing the trick doesn't automatically immunize you to the effect. You would have to go through a process of introspection and careful evaluation to defuse the marketers' hold on you, and who the hell has time for that? I propose an easier way. This only works for cameras, but cameras are the only thing that really matters.

The solution is this: fall in love with the last of the line. Embrace extinction. I'm talking about film cameras. They stopped making new ones* (except for toy cameras and sculptures) a long time ago. All the good ones, the very best ones, are already here, and have been for decades. You can cut the line and start with the end. Take your love, open the back of your camera, and load it in there. Then do it again and again, because love is inexhaustible, and film will almost certainly outlive you despite the dire prognostications of a few pessimistic prognosticators.

With your love safely banked, you're free to see your digital camera for what it is: a very capable and useful tool that you will one day probably need to replace. "They" can keep rolling out shiny new things, and you can smile indulgently as folks froth at the mouth about a quarter-stop of additional dynamic range on sensors that can already record fireworks and fireflies in the same shot at billboard resolutions, because you never know when you'll want to make a billboard. Good for them, you can think, as you load a fresh roll of slide film.

To recap: digital cameras are just tools. Embrace extinction.

Your digital camera will probably die before you, but then you can get another one without the emotional whiplash of love or broken dreams being invloved, much as you'd get a new hammer if yours snapped and sent the steel head whanging just past your eye. That the new camera will be "better" in some benchmarkable ways will be a nice bonus (and don't cheap out on a hammer again, you bonehead -- you only get two eyes, no replacing those). But that betterness (the camera's) won’t lead you to delude yourself that owning the new thing will open transformative avenues of expression and/or revolutionize the practice of your photography, because you’ve put your delusions, along with your love (and is there really a difference?) into your film camera. In fact, by the time whatever digital camera you have now shuffles off, your phone will probably be fine taking up the slack. Or you’ll be wearing a digital camera all the time anyway.

Good film cameras, of course, never die: they merely pause their function to request service. The vessel for your love will live on and if the order of things is preserved will make its final exit when you're not around to suffer it, which is also what children are for, so don't forget to make time for those. And be sure to tell them that the camera gear you're hoarding in the closet might be worth something when you're gone, if only to a few foolish souls soldiering along right behind you.

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*Yes, someone still makes new ones, but they're just new old ones, not new new ones.

Paris Photo 2016 Show Report

“Would you rather stew over the fraying of western democracy or soak in a deep pool of fine art photography?” And so I found myself at Paris Photo last week.

The Eye of Mammon shines over Paris Photo. It's much nicer since they moved the show from that subterranean warren under the Louvre to the Grand Palais.

Paris Photo is both a trade show and an art expo. It’s advertised in the metro, on the street, where the unwashed masses can catch wind of it and subsequently attend in an effort to better themselves. But the show’s true raison d’etre is getting galleries together in one place to facilitate the Monopoly-money economics of the fine art world. There are presumably collectors prowling around, collecting, though they are not immediately identifiable. I assume the galleries do some horse trading among themselves as well. Prints are sold for 5,000 or 15,000 or 50,000 euros. You see a lot of bottles of champagne opened: commerce at this scale is thirsty work. This kind of transaction usually happens in rooms where the hoi palloi never tread, so there’s a voyeuristic thrill to be had in rubbing up against it while wearing pants from Old Navy.

Apart from its sheer size and total lack of curatorial unity, this is what sets Paris Photo apart from a museum show: you can stand right next to the great pounding pistons of the machine, tucking in any loose clothing to avoid mangling accident. The hood is off, you feel the thrum of it, see the teeth of gears meshing implacably, shining and smiling hard in the bright daylight-balanced illumination. You hear the ecstatic greetings of near strangers, witness the carefully presented facades of clothes and faces, the leaning close, the parted lips, the excitement of acquisition and being acquired. You sense the invisible flows of currency coursing through the veins and arteries of the show, the fuel that drives this engine for transmuting art into investment.

Attractive people spend their time talking on phones amidst enormous prints. I have been attending Paris Photo for over a decade, and the women who work there never seem to get older. What is their secret? Mammon knows.

I go, not to increase the size of my collection of fine art (which contains not a single object or print, excepting my own), but to bask, to marinate, to steep myself in photography, potentially of excellent quality, and certainly of excellent print quality, especially if you like big prints. There is always art, real art, that resonates in the cockles and subcockles of my heart, shown at Paris Photo. A lot of it is canon, some of it is still damp from the womb, blinking in the bright light, untested.

The photographs hang naked on the freshly erected pre-fab walls, as honest and true as the artists that made them. That is, presumably, of greatly variable honesty and truth. There’s always a fair amount of stuff that does absolutely nothing for me, that I suspect, thought don’t quite have the courage to call out specifically in print, is dross of the most empty and cynical order. I strain to credit my own laziness, my closeted philistinism, for this interpretation, because it is depressing, enraging, to consider that in fact the gatekeepers and taste makers don’t know the difference, or more likely, know but don’t care, that their consideration of the bottom line outweighs all other considerations. If this is the case (and how, in this world, could it not be, at least often?) then I assume the buyers are complicit, more concerned with appreciating investments than appreciating art.

My frustration with the ratio of truth to trash at Paris Photo is offset by my secret delight in the worst work, which allows me to revel in a sense of superiority as I compare it to my own, ignoring for the moment that I am on the outside looking in, that I face the walls rather than face out at thousands of considering, judging eyes. These pieces allow me to indulge in that eternal fantasy of the unappreciated artist: that my work, as easily as some of this stuff, could be anointed, if only I were willing to play the game, dance with the vulpine elegance of gallerists, pander to fashion, etc.

A tilt-shift lens, a snappy suit, and a gold-plated handgun are all useful when attending Paris Photo. Flowers are appropriate for any occasion. I had never seen the rather amazing photo by Sean Hemmerle back there on the left (or had I seen it and forgotten it? In which case there is no hope for me).

Not all of the attendees with artistic aspirations are likely to be so bitter. A disproportionate number are photography students, dutifully toting heavy film cameras and notepads in which they scribble discerningly. I drift through them, vampirically savoring their youthful enthusiasm, stopping up my impulse to condescend, noticing how well their jeans fit. I never speak to them, would not spill the black ink of my cynicism on their clean white pages (they are almost always white). I imagine that they imagine themselves on those walls, that they are taking aim, carefully ignoring statistics, the preponderance of work by photographers who died before they themselves were born, the recurrence of certain names further slimming the room for new entrants. But as with the army of tiny fresh-hatched sea turtles blitzing the beach beneath the wheeling hungry gulls, some tiny percentage will make it. Under such withering fire, luck will play its role alongside ability. Such is the design of things.

The glass ceiling of the Grand Palais reflects the stalls below. If I'd had a tilt-shift lens maybe I could have corrected the perspective distortion evident here. But I didn't, because I don't own one. Ditto a gold-plated handgun.

Despite the nose-bleed elitism that drives Paris Photo, the event also embodies a wholesome democracy. A print that sells for more than a house reflects the same light into my eyes as it would into those of a collector with an exotic credit card. The galleries have staked their claim, merged money and mouth: this is what we have selected, what we think is best. And anyone can praise or piss on their selection (anyone with a disposable 30 euros and a free afternoon, anyway). For a few short days a year, the cards are all on the table. Then they’re folded back into dark, deep pockets.

Galleries are contractually obligated to use only information technology sourced from Apple. This is not true, but the show seems to exist in a pocket universe where the PC and Android never happened.

Anyway, this year I saw some cool photography, familiar and not. I might mention it in another post. Also, a lot of people were carrying neat old cameras, which was fun to see. You’d think film never went out of style. BMW is still a sponsor, and JP Morgan attached its name and apparently lent out some photographs from its collection. Money and cars: the link to photography is oblique, but I believe it is there. Leica had a little pavilion where I saw the new TL, mated absurdly to the already absurd new-old 28mm Summaron. In its glass case under LED spotlighting, perhaps bathed in an inert argon atmosphere, the TL looked impossibly clean, too pristine for this world. I did not particularly yearn to profane it with my touch: it seemed distant, an idol once worshiped by a long-disappeared alien race.

This might actually be the T rather than the TL, not that it matters. The camera will join the digital junk stream in the near future, but the lens will live on, hopefully taking wide angle views in bright light but probably sitting mintily in a cabinet.

The Future of Photography Has No Cameras or Photographers (Part 1)

I'm 39 years old, and I believe I will live to see the death of the camera as we know it today. A 10-year-old granddaughter will open a cupboard without my permission, irritating me, and ask, "What are these?"

I will sigh and say, "Those are cameras."

The insufficiency of this answer will be plain on her face.

"They're for taking pictures," I will add.

And she will look at me, puzzled, because the idea of a hulking thing that takes pictures just won't make sense to a young mind in that far-off year (I'm assuming, as one does, that I'll live to the optimistic side of the actuarial curve).

Today’s digital cameras are descended with astounding directness from the very first boxes with a lens to focus light onto a photo-sensitive surface. The basics were set down in a time before practical electric light, before powered flight, before a 25th territory joined the United States. Along the way it got easier to see what would be in the frame, and now cameras automatically expose and focus under a wide range of lighting conditions, and we don't need to develop film. That’s the 1820s up until the last few years, when cameras (in phones) became networked devices, which just means that nearly everyone on the planet can see our pictures right away. Which is progress, I suppose.

128 years separate these cameras. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. In the distant future archeologists will consider the stratum in which they are buried and marvel at the brief moment of its thinness. The broken camera stratum will overlap slightly with the horse bone stratum, and archeologists may wonder if cameras somehow killed off the once-ubiquitous quadrupeds.

Original Kodak Camera by National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution, CC attribution noncommercial, Nikon D5 by Kārlis Dambrāns, CC attribution

Here's the thing that the camera, in its march towards automation and better image quality, has been studiously ignoring for 200 years: most people don't want to take pictures. They want to have pictures. Of course, by "most people" (as is so often the case) I don't mean you and me. I mean everyone else. People who don't read essays about cameras. Many of them have been deserting the camera market in droves because their phones do a bang-up job of taking pictures, and the younger ones have probably never owned what we’d consider a camera at all. Or a telephone without a camera in it, for that matter.

What's really critical for us, though, is how many of them do still buy real cameras. Yes, they do, in the often mistaken belief that their phone isn't good enough. We depend on them, because there aren't really enough of us to drive a major global industry. But they aren't going to be around for us to kick much longer.

Like many things that can be successfully “predicted,” the agent of change is already here, but in a form that masks its significance. I believe that Google Glass-style augmented reality (AR) will become a thing in my lifetime. The technology will surpass the Google Glass quasi-prototype inflicted on us in 2013, by not being ugly and useless. I don't know exactly how it will work or what it will look like, but an army of beavering engineers (at Google, Apple, or somewhere we haven't heard of yet) will figure it out. Smartphones are already acting as prosthetic memories, and moving artificial intelligence up to eye-level will be the proverbial no-brainer when it can be done practically.

Did you know that Nokia was selling internet-connected phones in the 1990s? A few people loved them, but statistically, no one bought them. They were smart, but only relatively, a revolutionary idea that predated the technology necessary to make it practical (and the constellation of services that would make it desirable). Eventually more device makers piled onto the idea, but none really got it right. Readers of the technology press might remember feverish discussions of "convergence" as companies were trying to blend a pocket computer (then quaintly known as a "personal digital assistant," or PDA) with a cell phone. The results generally stumbled on both fronts, so badly that some industry observers, myself included, wondered what the point was. Why not have a nice little phone, and a nice PDA? Aren't we all men who wear pants with pockets? I was less enlightened and less perceptive back then, and perhaps not coincidentally I routinely wore cargo pants (and cargo shorts).

When the future arrives, it's ugly and doesn't work very well. Technology is a strange race where coming in first place often means becoming a historical footnote. Someone farther back watches the fastest runners cross the finish line, stagger to a stop and look around, panting and confused by the lack of cheering.

Nokia 9110 by Eirik Solheim, CC attribution sharealike, Google Glass by Kārlis Dambrāns, CC attribution (Also known for his stirring portraits of DSLRs -- weird that searching Flickr with unrelated terms, I picked two photos by the same guy.)

The defining consumer technology concept of this young century took off suddenly in 2007 when a maker of portable music players and expensive computers decided to shake the game up. By then I was wearing jeans with restricted pocket real estate, and was ready for the shift. Now only a few nerds and early-adopting business people remember the modern smartphone’s underwhelming, unpromising origins in those Nokia devices of the preceding century.

We're straying from cameras here, but bear with me. Google Glass is the smartphone at the turn of the millennium, looking like a half-baked solution in search of a problem. But our reality will be augmented eventually, because we (a more inclusive "we" that embraces us and them) are lazy and want all the help we can get processing the world, and because we hate to be alone with our thoughts. And the artificial intelligence we currently tap through our phones will need to see what we see in order to understand our needs before we do, which means some kind of imager will see everything we see. And boom, that will be the end of cameras, and of photography, as we know it.

Today we might praise a camera by saying that it functions "as an extension of the eye," but this is only a figure of speech. A true extension of the eye would need to be something that lives on your face, where your eyes are, and where an AR imager will be.

Perhaps, in the very beginnings of the AR moment, our imager might work like the crude camera on the first-gen Google Glass, which took a picture when you pressed a button on the frame or, god help us, said "OK Glass, take a picture" out loud. The engineers will do better than that -- remember, it took a while to figure out the touch screen. In the beginning, miniaturization will probably carry a penalty in terms of image quality, as with early phone cameras. But as happened with phones, the quality will eventually be good enough for most people.

At that point, most people, the huge majority, will never think about cameras again. The consumer market for dedicated cameras will end its long retraction with a final collapse. Today, there are conservatively half-a-dozen international companies competing fiercely for the serious consumer camera market. Some of them might remain in the professional image capture business: people’s everyday AR solution won't be suitable for billboard-sized advertising, and barring a cataclysm with few other upsides, the foreseeable future definitely includes advertising. But the days of deep-pocketed innovation in the consumer camera space will be over. The camera will be a backwater, niche object, perhaps a useful shorthand for indicating an era in fiction, and that is what I mean by the end of cameras as we know them.

This guy wants to be thinking about his camera. He is not like most people.

This is a not, I swear, a cautionary tale. It's prediction, not proscription. If you detect a note of approbation in this essay, it's probably my precocious grumpy-old-man-ness. I am interested in cameras for their own sake, I find the course of their technological development exciting, and I can see from where I'm standing the end of their story as objects that we, as a culture, care about. Boo hoo. I'm not overly worried about humanity lacking objects to care about.

With the collapse of the consumer gear industry, there will be no ads in glossy magazines (probably no magazines at all by that point anyway), no constellation of websites lapping at Amazon's referral fees. The camera fandom we have today, which has little to nothing to do with photography but is still a source of satisfaction and belonging for its members, will cease to exist. Of course, that makes it sound like the rug will be yanked out from under it, as if a revered television series were canceled mid-season, a bustling forum suddenly knocked offline. Indeed, it may feel like that for the few of us who remain, but our upraised voices will be drowned in a sea of indifference. By then a lot of us will be dead, and the rest old, and the people who come after us might understand that cameras were once a thing, and they might not, but the world will have new things on its mind, like stylish personal flotation devices to deal with the rising oceans.

Stay tuned for the next installment, in which I explain how photographers will follow cameras into the void.

Found, Lost, Found

Every passionate photographer has an origin story. There is an image, a camera, a path-changing encounter. A victorious note resonates even if the urge to photograph is born of loss: because of that, here I am, doing something meaningful.

People are less likely to talk about how they stopped making pictures. For the serial artist, it might be an urge to explore a new medium. For those who come to photography primarily through a passion for cameras, it can be as simple as losing interest in the gear, finding a new class of object to study and acquire. But for some, like me, there is no decision. I still wanted that snap of recognition when a scene ripe for seizure pops out of the world. It just wasn’t happening.

"The girls were referred to as 'notetakers' in Professor Crispin's contract."

A favorite from 2007. Stuff like this rained out of the sky. Until it didn't.

I first saw photography, as child in the 1980s, as a kind of magic: the power to make a moment reappear after the fact. But the trick gets old quickly, and almost immediately my interest shifted to cameras themselves, the embodiment of the magic. I loved their mechanical perfection, and the way I could atomize the world through the viewfinder, picking and choosing what to see. The pictures I made were a cool side effect of manipulating controls, framing scenes, releasing the shutter.

A little later in life, when I was old enough to recognize that nothing lasts and that memory is porous, I embraced photography as a way to bookmark moments I might otherwise lose.

But it wasn’t until my mid-twenties, when digital photography became accessible, that I found the freedom to really experiment with a camera and use it as a tool to explore the world, and maybe, to make art. I still loved cameras themselves, the perfect thingness of them, in a way that’s both irrational and unnecessary to explain to many people reading this. But I also began to feel my life shifting under the influence of photography as a practice. My way of seeing, tightly bound to ways thinking and being, became intimately linked to photography.

My main mode was street photography. I had recently moved to Paris. I carried a camera all the time. I shot a lot. I posted a photo every day on my blog on the pre-social web. I considered myself an amateur in the Frencher, non-diminutive sense of the word. And so passed six happy years.

"Lucy's outfits had to match her route to work."

And then something happened, or rather, stopped happening. I can’t pin down a moment. I was still carrying a camera all the time (by then, a fairly heavy DSLR). But I was barely taking pictures, outside of the life-documentary role that I’d assumed in my circle because I was the one who bothered to lug around a camera. I had stopped seeing the moments that I’d caught so often before. After months of this, I gave up carrying the full-sized camera and got an “enthusiast compact” (that revolution was just starting). It stayed stubbornly in my pocket.

Living in Paris, I couldn’t blame a lack of subject. The transitory tableaux of people, trash on the sidewalk, odd alignments and coincidences, the stuff that changes minute to minute and never repeats, has sustained many photographers over the course of a lifetime. Paris basically looked at me over the rim of her wine glass and said, "It's not me, baby. It's you." When people asked why I’d abandoned my blog, I had to admit: I’d just stopped seeing pictures.

I’m more a believer in the “perspiration” than the “inspiration” school of creative endeavor. But when it comes to photography, what constitutes perspiration? To the extent that I’d considered it at all, I would probably have told you that carrying a camera and keeping your eyes open were enough. Now, I can attest that they are not. Something else, probably involving attention and intention, has to be going on as well, but I haven’t been able to break it down. All I know is that I couldn’t decide to do it, and without it, I was sweating for nothing.

I was afraid that this blindness might signal a more profound problem. Was I getting too jaded, or too distracted, to connect with the world? Was stagnation in other parts of my life stopping up my creative flow? Introspection didn’t yield a definitive answer.

One thing I could safely rule out was gear boredom. The serious little compact I'd bought never quite felt like a real camera, and I ended up trading in the SLR for a much lighter mirrorless body. Despite the fact that the new camera was better in every way than the DSLR (apart from the tactility) I only used it for documenting the basics of life and pretty vacation shots. Very occasionally I'd see something like before, but those brief flashes only emphasized the prevailing darkness.

Sometimes a shot would still walk up and slap me in the face, but usually it was a pretty obvious one. Who would miss this?

The drought lasted about three years. I moved to a new apartment in Paris. I traveled. I worked, and didn’t, as circumstance allowed. Then my daughter was born. I took the obligatory baby pictures for her introductory months of life, at first, often with my phone. But something in me balked at poking a virtual shutter button and I limbered up the sadly neglected mirrorless camera. I began taking it out to document her in the stroller as we jaunted around town. I'd never bothered to buy anything more interesting than the kit lens, so I started to use an old manual prime I had left over from my SLR, the laborious focusing perfect for portraits of a baby who couldn’t do much more than stare back at me.

And just as inexplicably as when I'd been cut off, Paris started answering my calls. I saw things. I shot them. Pretty much like before. It's been over two years, so I don't think it's a flash in the pan.

"When it came to the ladies, Steve knew it was all about the approach."

Then I was back on the horse.

It’s tempting to think that the birth of my child was the spark that relit my vision, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It was about five months after she arrived that things changed. Maybe it took that long to recover from the shock and exhaustion of those first baby-caring days, but I don’t think so.

Ultimately, I don’t know why my vision deserted me, and I don’t know why it came back. But I know that when I lost it, it felt like a failing, and permanent. I write this so that a reader experiencing a similar loss will know that a pause, an extended rest in the symphony of your photography, doesn’t always mean the music is over.