NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHER’S BLOG

From Les’ blog. I think Tom Waits would be perfect to record this.

Over the years, and I mean going back to when we shared an apartment in our 20’s, Andy and I wrote tons of songs, both on our own and together.  Even a few years ago the urge resurfaced and we spent a lot of time working with a synth and drum machine and software to do the arrangements with.  But somehow, compared to my photography endeavors, nothing ever happened with the songs.

I had a feeling with photography about how to get it seen, even early on when I first approached galleries.  You could take a portfolio and make the rounds.  And the photographs, the prints, they were finished products.  You didn’t need much imagination to like or dislike them.  Whereas in the age of singer/songwriter, it wasn’t that feasible to keep saying, “can you imagine this with so-and-so singing it. “

Maybe there was a way, but without putting together a band with singers and musicians, you couldn’t just say to people, listen to this song and let them use their imagination in terms of what could be done with a good singer and arranger.  So that was the difference.

I think that if I had been able to perform my own music (I never had a pleasing voice, though I guess that didn’t stop some songwriters) but I also couldn’t get up in front of an audience and sing.  It was always too scary for me and still would be.

So that’s another difference.  As a photographer, you wander around and do your thing, but you aren’t a performer, and you don’t need to produce much more than a bunch of good prints.  To make it as a songwriter today — that seems to require more than just an ability to write songs.

I can’t put up pix of my niece’s birthday party without getting flak from the family – but I did do the whole thing in color in a Korean restaurant — so I don’t think they’d mind if I put up a shot of the waiters arriving with the cake.

Though I did get a nudge in the ribs saying why was I photographing the waiters.  Don’t worry – when they bring the cake to her, I’ll shoot her.  You’d better.  Don’t worry, I will.

1/20th of a second, asa 1600, f1.4

“NOTE TO PHOTOGRAPHY STUDENTS: I often get three requests a day for more information. Please do a search in the photo blog and you will find most of the information you need for your presentation.”

The deluge was so great that I couldn’t believe it but I put this note on the home page of my store.

I’m seriously thinking about responding that I will answer questions if you paypal me $10.

I remember when Soupy Sales, the host of a popular kids show, asked kids to go into their parents room and find those green pieces of paper they kept in their wallets and send them to him.  Uhm, that’s a paraphrase and I haven’t gone to Wiki to look up the exact words – but it was along those lines and boy did he ever catch hell for that. Read the rest of this entry »

[Seeing as how he don't have any new photos to post, though he did manage to get out and walk around with the camera, and how he didn't find anything worth shooting, and how it was a beautiful spring day - finally - the blogger decides to post another installment of his so-called memoirs.  And how he calls 'em memoirs, but they're just clips snapped of things that had meaning to him, both as a kid and later and  in no particular chronology.  ]

The imp with me is middle sister who did nothing but get me into trouble.

We were raised to be brave. Our fathers had returned from winning World War Roman Numerals One Twice That, as far as we kids were concerned, was the best use of Roman Numerals which they were still forcing us to learn in public school at the time.  World War II.  That, I can tell you, had a ring to it for us kids born after it was finished.  World War I – that didn’t even get a numeral without World War II.  We discussed these things with dead seriousness between class.  We did, grow up in it’s shadow.  And our parents became parents in it’s shadow.

We still made model planes of Mustangs and Corvairs and the British Spitfires. When they were stuck together properly, we held mock dog fights. We knew the climbing rate of these planes; where the machine guns were located.  We had our favorites, mine was the Mustang because of that unusual shape at the front.  We made enemy planes as well, like the Zero.

We had our non-WWII heroes as well: Davey Crockett was a real person for us. He killed Grizzley bears (b’ars) with his bare hands. Our fathers had been through a lot. Whatever they could do – we could do as well, though we did turn out to be the Peace Generation. That makes sense now as a rebellion against the previous generation which had almost destroyed the world, and did manage to get pretty close.

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The first photography job I had was as the photography counselor at camp Ella Fohs, when I was sixteen.  I used to start the kids off with photograms.  Go out and collect some stuff, leaves, stones, whatever you could put on a piece of photographic paper.  You’d put a glass plate on top to hold it flat, and turn a bare light bulb on for a few seconds.  Of course, wherever the objects were dense, you’d get light areas; and where there were transculecent areas you would get nice gray effects.

The kids were so excited as they would arrange their items on the paper.  The whole morning was part treasure hunt, part mystery of photography.  It was a good way to start because they could get immediate results.

You can’t imagine how thrilled they were with these magical creations.  We would mat them, and sometimes frame the best ones, and on visiting day, they’d run to their parents to show them these creations.  And the things they came up with.  I can remember one little boy who brought all sorts of quartz rocks he had been collecting, and let him arrange them for several minutes while the kids who were waiting grew impatient.  But finally, he made the final touches to his creation – and we made the photogram – and when he saw the result (which was beautiful) he let out a little cry of pleasure.

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I Meet Mark, Become Friends with Derick; Start & Finish My First Programming Job

[The blog isn't really a great place to tell long stories like this post.  Nevertheless, I'm going to keep adding to it; but at the same time go on with the rest of the blog.  Last added is at the bottom on April 8, of '09]

****PART A ****

I finished the three semester programming course at Columbia University and was recommended by my teacher for a job in Princeton, New Jersey.  I was living on the lower east side at the time.  But you know how it is with that first job.  You pretty much take whatever you can get.

My interview with Mark went something like this.  He was at the Princeton trainstop to meet me in a used BMW.  Mark was stocky, with darting eyes, a close-cropped beard to hide the double-chin, and did I say darting eyes.  When I say darting eyes, I mean – they didn’t stay still for a minute.  There was a combination of dark weird stuff in them, and a hard sort of humor.  First thing he did was take me to a local Princeton restaurant where he raved about the whitefish salad.  I don’t like whitefish salad.  He spread it on a bagel and wolfed it down in such a way that I don’t believe he tasted any of it.  He would turn out to be a wolf and a predator.  A cunning,  unfeeling man – much like the robots he had designed while at NASA.  Mr. logic.  And at the same time there was a craftiness in him.

He drove me to Marklin which was on the outskirts of Princeton in what had once been some kind of factory.  (Oh, the name: Mark & Linda were the married couple that ran Marklin).  I had never been in a BMW before and he drove like the nut that he was, and scared me pretty good by the time we arrived.  Or maybe I scare easy.  He extolled the virtues of feeling the road and all that crap.
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Q Train to Coney Island.

My mother’s side of the family were from Russia and this scene reminds me so much of my mother (who died about 20 years ago).  The train to Brighton Beach is filled with Russians and the ride takes me back to my roots.  How hard it was for my grandparents.  As Jews, they escaped from Russia before my maternal grandfather could be used as cannon fodder.  Charles arrived with two daughters and his wife.  My mother was born here.  So my aunts told me the stories of the pogroms.

Grandpa Charles was an oboe player in the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.  When he came to the states, the only job he could get was as a house painter.  I have to tell you, he was the best house painter in the Bronx.  He was so meticulous in everything he did.

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I added the Paypal Gift Certificate button to the store.  Why?  Because within the last few weeks I’ve had a few requests for it.  However, I have to say that when I used to have the gift certificate button on the site (a couple of years ago) I had exactly one order with it.  But what the heck – it was easy enough to do – and if I were going to buy a photo gift for someone, that’s how I’d do it.  (On the todo list: use one of my photos on the gift certificate rather than the default Paypal theme.)

I guess I’m not that sentimental.  My great uncle Sammy used to wrap up silver dollars and give them to me for my birthday.  Joe was my grandmother’s brother.  He was one of my favorite relatives (not because of the money) but because he was so much fun to be with.  He lived in this crummy one-room apartment near Coney Island.  My father would drop me off with him for the day, and we’d spend our time wandering around Coney Island, eating hotdogs at Nathans, and he’d let me ride the bumper cars for as long as I liked.

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A reader sent me this link  about Robert Frank and Jewish photographers.  The Jewish part is something I have thought about, and I think it’s aptly explained in the essay.  There’s also a link to a film called Pull My Daisy which Frank co-directed.

Yes, being a Jew has placed a critical distance between myself and this society.    I suppose it began early on when I was picked on by the local Irish kids.  I can remember some of these young kids throwing rocks at me when I was leaving a local Jewish school (I didn’t attend Jewish School but some of my friends did).  And I was involved in fights with these kids nearly every day.  Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost.  It didn’t matter.  I was a target, and I wasn’t sure why.

One day I was caught by a few of them and hung by my feet over a churchyard wall where there was a ten foot drop.  Somehow I squirmed out of their hold and got back on solid ground.

Read the rest of this entry »

As mentioned – I’m cleaning house.  I came across an old journal.

5-26-95

I’m moving closer to making photography a career – which is to say – trying to have more time for it.  I’m convinced that the effort should go into making as fine a print as I can – not sparing any expense or hardship.  And that the “rest” will unfold naturally, just as it has already.

Last week I sold 3 more prints in West Jersey to A–.  All in all I’ve sold prints to all my friends except Barry.  Barry is too much in competition to buy anything right now.

I was on a roll for the last week.  Began printing – smaller – 8 x 10 – on graded paper and was pleased with results.

I’m trying to be more Zenny – to do one thing at a time.  Very difficult for me.  I can’t stay in the moment.  I’m jumping ahead or behind.  I anticipate or dwell in the past.  I think it comes from stress of the computer field where – when – no – I remember it in all business endeavors where you are worried about sucess and failure.

If you can anticipate what will happen next – do you have a better chance to cope with it?  Maybe – but you lose the moment.  And the thing you’re preparing for may or may not happen.  What then?  Wasted energy.

6-7-95

A few days more until I leave for Yosemite.  One week’s vacation.  That is perverse.  How desperately I am looking forward to ONE week.  That proves how mixed-up my life has become – and that I have become a slave again.  Now I am Mr. Responsible.  I must throw this all off if I am to attain any freedom at all.

6-28-95

Hard to believe.  B. walks into my office and gives me a $4000 raise.  I am now making what – 60K for three days work?  How can I leave this.  They are driving me crazy with these gold chains.

::: They’re hard to read.  I was really so miserable.  Ten years ago.  People coming into my office to complain about tech glitches all the time.  Upper management pressing to get something done.  Underlings pressing because some piece of code either didn’t work, or was unclear.  Never a compliment.  Just promotions and more money.  And now I sit here and almost every day a nice note comes through the mail.  Now I worry about money – but not that much – and somehow things seem to work out.  There’s really something to be said for doing what you want to do.  Even if you don’t make it (money-wise) you still have the pleasure of feeling your spirit being unleashed.

From the last week:

Hi Dave,

I came across your website and work. Very nice work. Your “A Taste of Snow” photo is excellent and truly inspirational. As a photographer, I am always looking for those great little moments to capture.

Best,

C.

Surfing the web and saw your photos and had to write to try to say something that would tell you how amazing and beautiful I found them to be. But they are beyond words…

L.

Dad Lighting Candle

When last we left our intrepid hero, his bank account was frozen because he’d defaulted on his student loans ( used to get through a year and a half at NYU Graduate Film School).

He’s spent two years doing menial film work and at the same time he’s been writing screenplays.  The latest screenplay, Uncle Lou is being peddled around Hollywood by an agent.

And now he’s on his way back from Citibank, to the railroad flat he shares with his roommate Peter who looks like Errol Flynn and does nothing but read the sports pages of all the New York papers.

How he pays for his side of the apartment, I never did find out.  But there’s an armchair in the living room which divides my side of the apartment from his (my bedroom looks out on east seventh street) and no matter where I’ve been, or how long I’ve been away or what time it is when I walk into the apartment, Peter is in the armchair reading the back pages of the paper.

I enter the apartment and Peter waves a telegram at me without taking his eyes from the paper.

The telegram is from my agent on the West Coast.  It says that the screenplay (Uncle Lou) written by me and Les has gotten a green light.  The deal that the agent had been talking about has gone through and Sam Fuller (The Big Red One and a film auteur) will direct…  Lee Marvin will play the aging detective – Uncle Lou;  Deborah Harry (Blondie) will be the femme fatale, and I could be wrong but I think the Karate Kid had been signed, or was close to being signed.

So after months of having the script go up to the top of some studio, and then be rejected and riding this thing like a wave; and now with my bank account frozen and no money coming in; here is the big telegram that should change my life.

In fact, with this telegram I am able to borrow money from my dad – who can see that all this will finally pay off – and I am able to wave it around in a few places I eat and get credit; and things are looking up for exactly four days.  On the fourth day, I walk into the house, and Peter is looking at the back-pages so that I see the front headline of the paper: Lee Marvin dead!

Now I was telling this story yesterday to my sister and father as we sat in a diner and we were all laughing so hard – especially when my sister said – that’s what you should call your memoirs:  Me and Lee Marvin…

Because after that, Sam Fuller pulled out of the project since he was only going to do it if he could be with his buddy Lee.  And without Fuller or Lee, no one else was interested.

But that’s not the end of it because the would-be producer came back and told me that some other big-shots were interested.  The only problem was that they thought that Uncle Lou was too old.  Of course that was the whole point of the movie.  And that if he were given a love-interest and could be in his fifties, it would be a much more sellable project.  And – that they would pay for $10,000 to write the screenplay again with these changes.

So after three plus years with the script, I came to this next canyon of a decision and said no.  I wouldn’t work on it anymore.  I wouldn’t write anymore scripts.  I never wanted to write a script again.  Period.  Done.  And you know what – I’m finished with the movie business.

And I was.

Why this was so funny – I don’t know – but if I do ever meet you and tell you the story in person, I’m certain that it will strike you as comical.  The more pained I am as I tell it, the funnier it will be.  But it was another turning of the screw which was my life at the time, and considering the lifestyle of Lee Marvin (uhm, drinking to excess) – it was amazing that he lasted long enough to read my first and last green-lighted screenplay.

[An obvious question: well, whatever did happen to the Uncle Lou screenplay?  Was it ever made?  Not to my knowledge.  And I sold the rights for all-time, and there was a phrase that said, In All Known Universes, in case you're reading this in another universe.

I used my share of the sale to buy my first computer, a Kaypro, this was before the IBM PC and that was what lead me into the world of computers... but that is for another day]

I was 34 years old.  I had been out of film school for three years and I was standing online at a Citibank ATM.  I had been doing gaffer and grip jobs on low-budget movies, and while I was waiting to get paid from the last one where I had been a film loader, I was waiting to take some cash out of the bank.   In those days, you didn’t swipe the card.  You put the card into the slot, did your transaction, and then hopefully the card was returned to you.  It was one of the early mistakes in the ATM design because sometimes the machine would  swallow your card.

But this time was different.  My card was swallowed and there was a message flashing on the CRT saying that I needed to see the bank manager and to mention code number something or other.

Frightened since I was down to my last ten dollars, I approached the bank manager who looked up my account and told me that I my bank loan with Citibank had gone into default and that my assets (less than $100) had been frozen; and no, I couldn’t have my card back, and that it wouldn’t work anyway.

It shouldn’t have come as a big surprise since Citibank had been sending me letters for a few years asking for payment for my grad school loans;  but I simply didn’t have the money and couldn’t figure out anywhere to get it from.  Since leaving film school I had been doing menial film jobs.  The first job was carrying sandbags for a low-budget comedy (look my name up in the imdb.com and you’ll see two film credits).  This was the Outdoorsters, and my job along with one other 30-year old was to carry sandbags in the New Jersey summer heat so that light stands and various stuff didn’t tip over in the wind.  For three years I had been working my way up the technical film ladder, but it was a carnival sort of existence.

As I walked out of Citibank, I thought, now I am truly penniless.   How had things gone so wrong since that glorious day when I had been accepted into film school?

It hadn’t been that long ago, that I had dashed down sixth street to a phone booth, after an interview with the head of the school, Lazlo Benedek himself – director of Marlon Brando in the Wild One – and shook his hand and been accepted into one of the top graduate film schools in the country.  I had crossed Broadway and there was a phone booth near Cooper Union.  I remember as I dashed across Broadway feeling that with such a good thing on one side of the ledger, something horrible would happen to me soon.  I called my sister and my parents and gave them the unbelievable news.

The head of NYU Grad School had read, or at least weighed the 450 page screenplay that I’d written with my friend Lester, (yes, the same Les that chimes in here sometimes), and Lazlo had said that the screenplay was completely unproducible, but that anyone that could write such a long screenplay, and I also had brought photographs that I had taken in my teens, and a 16mm film that I did that was shown once on channel 13 – and somehow – I was in.

And that was the start of probably the best year-and-a-half of my life.   I walked into the lobby of film school on sixth street off of first avenue – and for the first time in my life – I felt at home.

[Faux Editor: Dave seems to be attempting a memoir, although the chronology so far is as jumbled as his path at the time.  Right now it has a jigsaw feeling to it.  Maybe it will become clearer if he goes on with it.]

Up until the age of 28 when I entered graduate film school, just about every major decision I made was wrong.  I’m not kidding.  I had a true love for still photography, but ended up majoring in philosophy in college.  My schooling was so erratic that I can barely keep track of it.

Let’s take it from the start.  I was a poor student in elementary school.  I never studied unless it was the night before, or in one instance where I had a crush on my teacher and out of the blue began to get A’s in physics of all things.   That only lasted until I saw my teacher drive off with her boyfriend in a small sports car.

They assigned me to play the trombone in the school orchestra.  I hated the instrument, but never protested.  I also never practiced.  When it was time to take tests to get into a specialized high school, such as music and art, I auditioned as a trombone player.

I had by that time been doing still photography for a few years, but it never dawned on me to try and get in based on this love.  Instead I blasted the audition committee with a few bars of something and was quickly rejected.  Why didn’t I just bring in some of my early photos; some of which still hang on walls of family members; and which later would help me get into film school?

I asked my father why would I have done that?  His theory was that I simply had no idea of the future.  But had there been some guidance counselor, or somebody who could’ve seen what I liked to do – things might’ve been different.  I never spoke to anyone, not a guidance counselor, and not my parents, about which high school would be best for me.

My grades weren’t good enough to get into any decent high school,  and I ended up in a rough high school called Clinton where everything revolved around sports and there was a lot of gang activity, and I spent most of my time just trying not to get beat up.  I think back on my three years at DeWitt Clinton as prison time.  I’ve spoken with others who went to the school at the same time as me, who had a great time there and have fond memories of the place.  I don’t.

So then it came time to go to college.  I just wanted to go to a school nearby, which turned out to be Lehman College.  I remember standing in the crowded gym during registration, and you had to pick a major.  There were long lines for the popular majors, such as literature, film & television, and so not wanting to stand on a long line, I picked my major – philosophy – because it was the shortest line during the admissions process.  The idea of taking media studies or anything creative was just beyond my comprehension.  I was standing still, but I was an unguided missle careening in the wrong direction?

To make things worse, I become something of a star in the undergraduate philosophy classes.  I read the great philosophers and was eager to talk about them in class.  I was especially good at logic and the professors kept giving me high marks.  One day, after two years at Lehman, my philosophy teacher suggested that I change schools and go to the University of Buffalo which had a world-class philosophy department (whatever that means).

That was my next, and possibly biggest mistake.  Yes, in the scheme of things, going to Buffalo to study philosophy was just stupid.  Everything went wrong.

I think it was at my first high-level philosophy seminar, sitting in a room with eight other students and the professor, when a bolt of philosophic lightning struck me: philosophy was about building houses and waiting for the next philosopher to knock them down.  Truth couldn’t be discovered through this sort of study.  Whatever first principle you might hold on to, would eventually be overturned by the next architect.

I hated Buffalo.  First off, it meant paying for school (nothing by todays standards), and that is something that my father is not exactly up to.  It’s one thing to grow up in a poor family.  It’s another thing to be on your own and poor.  I end up taking all sorts of odd jobs, including for a while playing chess for money.

I never felt so alone  being away from my family and neighborhood for the first time.  Because I was in the cheap dorms, my neighbors turned out to be drug dealers and thieves.  I fall in with them for a while, writing volumes in my journals about the goings on.  Someday, I’ll put this in a book I tell myself.  But I never do.

Since philosophy has lost it’s sheen, I take up literature.

Here I fall in with a different crowd, equally dangerous: everyone wanted to be a writer.  All they talked about was dropping out of school and writing books.  And so, with one semester left to get my dual philosophy / literature degree, I made the next big mistake: I dropped out of Buffalo.

Oh, my poor father.  What I put him through.  I had no money for train fare (Buffalo is a long distance from NYC) and in a blizzard, I hitched home.  I arrived back in the Bronx a shell of my former self.  Cold, wet, and utterly defeated.

It was around this time that I moved into an apartment in Flushing Queens with Lester.   That year or so could be a book in itself; but for now I’ll just skip to the next mistake which was that I was for the first time getting the  idea of  becoming a photographer.   Again, without guidance, and surely I wouldn’t have asked for any, I went about it in a half-assed way.

I  looked in the newspaper  want-ads for photographer trainees but never saw any positions.  One day I see a want-ad for a chemical mixer in a big photo lab in Manhattan.  Not exactly photography, but close.  Again, I’m at the bottom, but I believe that somehow I’ll inch my way into the profession.

What does mixing chemicals in a photo lab have to do with creative photography?  Uhm,  nothing.   But after mixing chemicals in a big vat of witches brew with a plastic paddle for 3 months, I’m  promoted to color printer for commercial accounts.

For days on end, I print Pan Am ads.   In the history of the company, I was the first one to ever make it out of the chemical mixing room into the printing room.  That was the beginning of another odd pattern.  I began jobs at the bottom, worked my way to the top, and then quit.  I was always a good worker.  I could do mundane tasks or complex tasks.  But what I couldn’t figure out was how to do that creative thing, whatever it was at the time, for a living.

Somewhere in the period, I also worked as a can-carrier in a motion picture lab.  (There’s a good Jerry Lewis movie about this).  All I can remember from this period was riding the train back to Queens, and having hallucinations where all the straphangers became cans of film.

And since I was living in Queens, I did take two courses at Queens College.  What they were, or why I took them, I have no idea.  Probably to please my father.

After quitting the printing job, and the can carrying job, I did ask my father for help.  Being a social worker, he pulled some strings and I wound up as – maybe this was the bottom – a mental health therapy aide (orderly) at Kings County Psychiatric Hospital.

Do you remember that old show Quincy where the would-be coroners are shown fainting away at the sight of their first corpse.  My introduction to Kings County was a visit to the ward where they kept patients who were in the final stages of syphilis.   Half the inductees quit that day.

I was thinking that this would be good experience for a writer, and that the writer should experience everything. I was assigned to the night shift.  I’ll tell you one quick story.  One night, I’m in the ward alone, when three cops arrive with a guy handcuffed behind his back.  They pass through the two security doors, and tell me to sign for the guy.  I ask why he’s being brought here and they tell me that he just murdered his wife, and needs to be held for psychiatric evaluation.  With that, they remove the cuffs, and leave him in my charge.  He’s a small heavily muscled guy who just stares at me without moving.  I suppose I was just waiting to be killed.  The other orderlies are off somewhere, probably selling drugs they were stealing from the hospital.  So he continues to stare at me for an eternity, and then moves slowly into a corner of the empty ward and begins doing push-ups; counting off each one.  He does a lot of push-ups, then he turns and says to me: I need to do that, otherwise I might hurt someone again.  I move slowly into the nurses station, lock the door behind me and watch him through the glass.  He sits down in a chair and just stares off into space for a while.  Then puts his head in his hands and begins weeping.  I still remember that sound and how it echoed through the halls.

I won’t go into what happened in that hell hole other than to say, I never wrote about it because – even though I was on the other side of the glass – it was difficult to know who was more dangerous, the patients or the staff.

After a few months of the night shift, I give up on the idea of experiencing everything, and went back to Buffalo to try and finish my degree for one semester.   Now – get this.  I was so screwed up, that I finished the semester, but didn’t turn in one last English paper I needed to graduate.   I couldn’t bring myself to write the last paper – which of all things was on Kafka (one of my favorite authors at the time).

So by this time, I’m coming back to the city, maybe I’m 25 and I still don’t have a college degree and no ideas about jobs; but the writing kick has returned so I look for jobs at publishing houses.

Another mistake: I get a job as an order clerk.  I copy ISBN numbers from one piece of paper to another.  From one box to another.   But I have a plan.  I make an arrangement with the boss to work there for one year if he’ll agree to fire me so that I can get unemployment insurance.

The truth is, I never could find anything that I liked doing and get paid for it.  My boss follows through with the plan and after one year I end up in a basement apartment in the Bronx trying to write.  And trying is the operative word.  Now that the pressure is on, I have nothing but writer’s block.   I torture myself over every word.   After a year, I’ve only written one very short story and unemployment insurance is used up.

And finally, I don’t know how the I got the idea, I try to get into graduate film school.  Only problem is that I still don’t have my undergraduate degree.  I dash off a paper on Kafka in one night.  My adviser at Buffalo says that I had been one week away from not being able to graduate when the paper came in.  But it’s accepted and I get my degree.

With that I apply to NYU Graduate School.  Somewhere during this time I had written a very long screenplay with Lester that was about 450 pages long.  I used to write my scenes every day on the train going to the publishing house.  So with that screenplay and a bunch of photographs, many taken when I was 15, and a film I had made as a teenager, I was accepted into NYU.

The head of NYU has gives me a personal interview (which I find out was rare) and tells me that although the script isn’t very good, anyone that could put so much effort into a script should at least be given a chance.

Only problem was money.  So at 26 years old, I talked my parents into letting me move back home for one year so that I could work (at the publishing company) and have enough money to get me through the first year at Grad. School along with loans.

That was the first thing that I did right.

When others were getting places in their careers, I entered NYU Grad. School, and for the very first time in my life – found something, some place, that I enjoyed and where I fit in.  I loved it there.

After running out of money, I began another long string of menial and manual sorts of jobs in the film business: carrying sandbags to hold down equipment; and eventually worked my way up to gaffer, and grip and got more and more responsibility.  I was offered a job as cameraman on a low-budget comedy – and here was my next mistake.  I turned it down.  Why?  That I do remember.  I wanted to be able to express my own voice.  The cameraman, or lighting director were at the whim of the director, script, actors.  You could do beautiful work in the service of pure crap.  So I left that part of the business and started writing screenplays.

That was not a mistake, because eventually one of the screenplays was picked up by a major studio and a famous director and had the green light when Lee Marvin (who was going to star in the movie) died.  Then the whole deal fell apart.  Okay, not a mistake, but anyone with any real drive would’ve gone on and done another script, or whatever it took.  I was so sick of writing that I gave it up completely.

Around this time, owing money to the bank for my student loans from film school, my loan went into default, and whatever money I had in the bank was frozen.  I got to a point where I didn’t have money to look for a job.  And therein is another series of pretty demeaning jobs for someone that had been at NYU Film School.  The low point was working as a secretary for a public relations firm.  I would have to make coffee for guys that were holding meetings that were much younger than me.  This was the low point.  This was that Gone With the Wind moment where you say: I will never go hungry again.

And that’s where the computer programming episodes come in.  I went back to school at night and studied programming at Columbia University.  I had to start at the bottom yet again.  And I did.

So let’s just put an ellipse in now… and maybe I’ll fill in the part about how I actually wound up doing photography again…

But to arrive at a point where I’m doing what I want to; where I wake up looking forward to the day; that has not come about easily.    I was in the car the other day when Frank Sinatra was on the radio singing, My Way.  Talk about my way…

And so here I sit, with requests for advice coming in all the time about how to become a professional photographer.  Do you really think, after reading this, that I’m the best one to ask?  Did the route need to be as rough as it was?  How much of all those experiences that I can only touch on here are related to my shooting?  A lot.  And I haven’t even touched on all the personal dramas that went on with family and love interests during this time.

But I do have one bit of advice though.  If you are doing what you enjoy, whether it’s a hobby (I don’t like that name) or for a living, then whatever happens you can’t really have any regrets.  It’s when you go into something that you think you’re supposed to be doing, but that rubs you the wrong way, that you look back and wish you had at least continued with your passion.  And it doesn’t mean becoming a professional.  I shot stills at every opportunity for ten plus years before the idea of making a living at it became a possibility.  And how can I look back at those years with regret?  In the case of photography, it just means that you keep on shooting.