The Art and the Life60

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel, my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light, a vast pattern of which I am a part. What is the pattern, or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?

—Richard Feynman

It’s not about photography. It’s not about art. It’s about living the life. Then again, these are just different dimensions of the same thing, different paths to the same destination.

The rock, the mountain, the sky, the canyon, the coyote, the stars—all fellow travelers in time. It calms me down, the vastness of it all.

Order comes from chaos, and entropy from order; peace comes from violence, and turmoil from imperfect peace; beauty comes from perception, and perception from consciousness; or is it all the other way around?

Good art is the product of good artists. Good artists are good people. Good people possess compassion, empathy, and humility. There is not enough good art.

I am an artist. What does that mean? It’s a thing I say, for those who can’t understand, to make them go away thinking they understand. I didn’t understand until it happened to me. Do you understand?

I am a photographer. What does that mean? It means that I own a camera and push its buttons every so often. It means nothing. I am me. Photography is my art. Just because. Pictures don’t matter if I don’t matter. Pictures are not important if I’m not important. That’s what makes it worth doing, to me, anyway.

Trapped on a small planet. Ninety million miles from an ordinary star; one of more than a hundred billion stars in an unremarkable galaxy; itself one of a couple of hundred billion galaxies in a universe that may well be one of a great many other universes. Who cares if I make a photograph? I care, and perhaps you care, and that is enough.