Hold on, but not too tight
This is the way I see the world. In patterns. Graphic compositions. Life made-up of scenes like this one. Sometimes I place someone in the frame—Mary, the kids, some friends—but more often than not I don’t, as if just taking the picture fits one more piece into my life’s forever unfinished puzzle.
“Composing a picture is like holding a bird,” my first photography teacher said to me when I took his class at The Maine Photographic Workshops some forty years ago. “If you hold the bird too loose, it flies away. If you hold it too tight, it dies.”
Words for making pictures, but also for living life. Hold on too tight, and bad things happen. Loosen up, and good things will come to you. Craig Stevens is still teaching his workshop, still telling his students to relax, though I’m sure he would not remember me, nor what he said back in 1980 when I took his course.
During one field trip to Pemaquid, Craig turned to the group standing at the foot of Maine’s most famous lighthouse and said, “if you can’t find something to photograph here, there’s nothing I can do for you.” Craig not one to mince words, wasn’t here to tell us everything we do is great. Maybe in some way I’m still searching for his approval, the way we do our parents’, our life long struggle to make something out of nothing. But there would be no participation trophy’s handed-out by this teacher. Craig was teaching us how see, how to critique, how not to settle. Between the incredible rock formations, the ocean, the light house, and the tourists themselves, there was something for everyone.
I remember struggling a bit under this direction, which was the point. As if he was saying, “What are you going to do with your camera and the rest of your life? Point and shoot, or make something happen?”
The same week our small class wrestled with our nascent creative passions, Borg and McEnroe wrestled in the 1980 Wimbledon finals for what would be one of the great five set matches. I rose early and watched every point of this from the porch of the Rockport motel room where I was staying. This only a few years after we’d played against John McEnroe in highschool, not in tennis, but in basketball and soccer. We beat him at those games, but couldn’t possibly at this one—his passion and calling. What would McEnroe do with his racket and life? Scream. Yell. Win. On this day, was he holding on too tight? Was he too struggling for approval?
Images like the black and white ones I post here jump out at me, as if reminding me of my own calling. “Look at me,” the scene seems to be shouting, like many other scenes will again before and after this one. ”Look at me and hold on,” their call, “but not too tight.”
