your voice takes you to what it wants to sing

Last night I drove through an hour of primitive rush-hour traffic to the Atlanta campus of SCAD so I could see Greg Gorman give a talk.

He's one of the most popular celebrity portrait photograhers in the country. Though his name isn't as well known as someone like Annie Leibovitz, he's photographed hundreds of stars over the years, people like Muhammed Ali and Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and Bette Davis. He does beautiful black and white studio portraits, high contrast images with simple backgrounds.

He spent an hour with the audience, going through his wonderfully impressive slide show. Then took some questions from the audience.

One person asked him how he got started in the business. He said after he finished college, he started shooting headshots in LA for $35 a day. Eventually he got good at it and began to draw attention from studios looking for glamorous images of their stars. He got a few projects shooting high-profile stars like Barbra Streisand. And the rest is history. Now Bette Midler invites him to lunch, Pierce Brosnan asks him to shoot his wedding, and Robert DeNiro comes to his rooftop parties (not kidding).

When I hear stories about "humble beginnings" like his, part of me is inspired. Another part of me gets hung up. It seems like the days of starting that small and working up to something that big are long gone. The world I'm living in today is saturated with people with digital cameras and expensive lenses who want to make a buck off their skills. The 60s are over, Jim Morrisson is no longer available to be photographed, and I don't live in LA. Brand new game.

At the same time, I know this line of thinking is too pessimistic. Really, any story that involves an artist actually making a good living by producing good work is a story that I can appreciate. Greg Gorman had a passion, and he followed it, and believed in the fact that he had something interesting to contribute to his field.

A couple of weeks ago I heard an interview on NPR with Patty Griffin (whose new album, Children Running Through, is making me happy). The interviewer asked Patty about her artistic process. How did she manage to write so many great songs? The response:

"I just really need to sing and sing and sing, and not worry about writing. Just by singing for pleasure, your voice takes you to what it wants to sing. And that is how the best stuff emerges. It just pops right out."

More and more, I'm coming to see that this process of getting into photography, into my artistic life, is just about doing it. Going after it, even if I am sure that the market is saturated already. (What the hell does market saturation have to do with my artistic vision, anyhow?) This is not about the experience of someone who got started making images 30 years ago, or 60 years ago, or 90 years ago. It's about being awake to what's happening around me, taking photos every single day, and following the thread of pleasure that runs through all of it.