I'm a very intense person that focuses on on what I'm doing and emptying my mind completely
from other things.
I work on an emotional level also. Some have their pictures planned out and that sort of thing
but I don't have that kind of mind. I'm more of an emotional photographer than an intellectual one.
I had several influential people, of course, studying with Ansel Adams and being his professional
assistant for a few years and I studied with Minor White and, of course, we had a pretty fine
association with Edward Weston. Of course, Dorothy Allakin too, possibly her enthusiasm
and dedication to photography. It was very impressive and the subject matter of how she
was devoted to a certain theme of photographs in her lifetime. Dorothy Allakin and I worked on
a very meaningful project called Death of a Valley which Life Magazine commissioned us to do
the Beriesa Valley which is now Lake Beriesa and we were covering the last year in the valley
before it was destroyed. And Dorothy Allakin was an excellent critic. Dorothy always said,
well, if you bring photographs to her, you leave your friendship at the front door
and she really is excellent in separating those. In a photograph, you have to have
something besides the ingredient of beauty. That's only one part of the picture. I think
art, it makes a full cycle around and, you know, the social, the sociological conditions in the
world and everything really has a direct influence on what we do and how we do it. I think in our
present time, there's a lot of artists that do not identify with beauty and there's a lot of
artists, painters, that do not identify with color and that happens to be two things and I'm deeply
interested in. There's people I know that are friends that are very negative in everything
they look at. Don't like the idea of the possibility of that influencing me, the
negativeness. There's plenty of it in the world. It doesn't mean that everything has to be
beautiful or positive. I've done photographs where I've shown how bad things are
and so people can look at that, perhaps change. So photography has a lot of uses.
I had the good fortune of teaching photography at the California School of Fine Arts
and it's called now the San Francisco Art Institute. I taught photography there for 28 years. I
enjoyed very much teaching beginning students. I've often said that you can reach a beginning
student whereas if you have a graduate student, they have a certain attitude that they're on a
high plane and they know just about everything so I was never able to reach their minds or
be of any contributing value to them. You must please yourself first and I was never a teacher
that felt complimented if someone was trying to please me or imitate my work. Some teachers
like that adoration and so forth and some teachers have a whole group of people,
students around them, they're sort of like groupies and they're not able to get out of that orbit
and work on their own. This has happened quite a number of times.
I always encouraged them if they wanted to go professional. I never discouraged anyone in
that direction. I tried to point out it takes a special personality to deal with people and to
be successful from a professional point of view and not all people can do that. You have to have
a certain amount of aggression and fortitude and well a will to do that and also economic pressure.
Sometimes you have to make a choice and how you're going to make money because we all need it.
I can still, I still photograph but I photograph without a camera and use my eyes
and I do hundreds and hundreds of pictures every day by just looking at objects and
for those of us that are visual artists that becomes part of your brain and you can't get
out of that. You're locked into it and that's it.
