11 | COLLEAGUE: DUNCAN McCOSKER, 1944 – 2016

It has been my intention to present pictures of the people I write about here, but I don’t have any genuine pictures of Duncan. We were often working back to back, or he was way out in deeper water, or over a rise in the terrain, or later in his career, on another continent.

On my last day with him, in July 2016, just before he left the hospital to rest at home with his wife Hyunmi for his final days, he wanted to look at pictures – his, mine, others’. He was a uniquely patient viewer and reader of photographs, noting more than once over the years that “photographs reveal their meaning over time.”

The very last picture that day, one of my old ones from a time before we had met, held him for quite a while, even though he was clearly fading. After his many detailed and encouraging comments, just when I thought he was done with it, he looked up brightly and laughed, “Hey! There’s a third dog in this picture!”

10 | Colleague: Dana White

I call him Pat, from our old days in the desert in the 1980's. Always committed, he brought a view camera to his first basic photo class and worked straight through the program with it. Now he goes by Dana as an artist.

We were talking about the freedom of monochrome photography–it must have been over the phone, because I have no true record of Pat's statement.

Two years, later, we are still trying to reconstruct it, roughly like this:

"A photograph shows people another way to look at what they have already seen."

9 | Colleague: Bernd Reinhardt

Bernd saw a brief statement I had made to Mike Anton of the LA Times. He then looked up my work to find out who I was and sent me a note that our pictures, or our efforts to make them, had some things in common. They certainly do.

If you think that Bernd's gaze here is penetrating and supremely focused on my lens, you should see him when he looks at your pictures. His encouragement is generous and his criticism is precise and encompassing.

When I show Bernd a picture, I get two questions (which he expects the very best pictures to answer for me on their own):

"Who are you?" 

"What is this?" 

8 | Family Matters: Bob Wing

I had just finished reworking my basic photo lab manual, which I then re-named Photography and Common Sense.
I mentioned this to my father, who noted, "If it's common sense, you shouldn't have to write it down."

7 | Mentor: Ben Lifson, 1941-2013

The founding faculty of CalArts wisely opened the school in 1970 with a full complement of students, admitting transfers into all four undergraduate levels as well as the graduate program. I was in the mixed roomful of photographers where Ben immediately sliced through what we thought we knew, challenging us to seriously make legitimate pictures.

Ben set me up for life.

6 | Family Matters: Lola

I was not a dog person.

But Debbie was interested in finding a therapy dog and training it to comfort hospital patients and other people in difficulty, so we began a vigorous search. We visited a number of rescue placement sites and events, and we interviewed rescued dogs who came with their caretakers to visit us at home. Not as a last resort, but at the end of a long day of searching all over the L. A. basin, we visited a placement event on busy, noisy Ventura Boulevard, just a mile from our home.

It was there that I was introduced to Lola, who approached me with hopeful self-assurance and asked, "Are you my papa?" 

What could I say? 

The therapy had begun. 

5 | Family Matters: Debbie

I have become very fond of Debbie Richardson. 

Debbie  |  c. 1963  |  Photo by Charlie Richardson

About 15 years after this picture was made by her father, Debbie and I, by then friends, hiked to the top of Cowles Mountain east of San Diego. Looking to the west with our cameras, we saw suburban neighborhoods spreading back from the Pacific, fringed at the base of our mountain by new foundations and fresh framing. I said, "I'll bet you could make a historical photograph from up here." 

Brightly and instantly, Debbie replied: "Aren't all photographs historical photographs?"

4 | Family Matters: Alex

When Alex was four or five, we walked down the street to an estate sale at the big, blocklike two-story Craftsman house which loomed just a little higher on the property's raised grade. We admired the treasures left by the neighbor we had not known, an elderly music teacher. We were both impressed with the collection of sheet music and the open wooden cabinets in which they were filed horizontally.

Later, Alex reported at home: "When people are going to die, they put a FOR SALE sign in front of their house, and then they die."

Alex visits Dr. Fonseca  |  1985

3 | Family Matters: Emily

When Emily was about four years of age, I was distracted by something "important" while she was politely trying to engage me in some activity. Frustrated with my inattention, she gave me these indelible words: "Dad, when people talk to people, people answer people!"

Emily in the San Joaquin Valley  |  1978

2 | A Note from Ron Strange

Fifteen years later, just yesterday, I got a message from Ron Strange, who included his introduction to his new series of pictures from Yellowstone. With his kind permission I'll share it here; I used to teach him and now he teaches me:

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Why is ambiguity unsettling for some? How would they describe the feeling they get when confronted with ambiguity? When the word "ineffable" was first created, what was the experience that called for its creation? What is the origin of a numinous experience and why did they decide it needed a word?

If the haiku poet Basho had had a camera, what would his photos have looked like? When does minimal become nothing? Will it still move the viewer? Why is it that one person is moved and another not at all by the same image?

I was asked, "What were you thinking when you took that picture, it doesn't make sense?"

I was not thinking.

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Ron working, Cuyamaca Rancho  |  1986

1 | Encouragement from Allwyn O'Mara

Some time ago, I was just back from another week in Death Valley, working on a long series of very spare landscape pictures, and my friend Allwyn O'Mara asked me what I had seen. I said, "Nothing."
She cheered, "So you had a great trip!" 

Allwyn at the Rogue River  |  1996