People often talk about art as self-expression, and count self-expression as something that all people should engage in for their well-being. This is true—that all people should engage in it! and that self-expression is like salt, lacking which one is not healthy.

Yet the critical thing, the needed thing, the meal, is to create—to bring something new into existence—and this is not self-expression by any means. One never creates anything by pushing out what is already there inside himself. To create is more to heed the possibility that something may appear before you; it is having the balls to hold your eyes on the thing and let it affect you; it is also to carry out the mundane work of manifesting that thing, which was principally in just your own eye, and reify it.

This manifesting can happen in painting just as well as in music, math, cooking, parenthood, sermons, criticism, love, room-cleaning, or indeed photography.

The important thing, the heart-warming thing, in to be a photographer is not to carry a camera; it is not to release the shutter. To be a photographer is to be willing to go to a place where something might occur. To face and accept the possibility that nothing might occur. And to serve the occurrence, when it happens, openly and courageously, by setting the aperture, opening the shutter, printing the film, cutting the prints, and laying them in sequence.

In the end, your self will be more or less expressed. You cannot remove your personal fingerprints from the work. And who you are is eminently important, but only because you are typically the only the only one who can have witnessed the event. To know myself, I should aim to know what medium I'm most at home with, so that the camera, or the word of counsel, or the concise equation, is ready when the event occurs.

To create is to put myself in a place where an event can occur to me. This takes courage, energy, and open eyes.

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