How to practice

Someone on DPR asked about one of the Ansel Adams Friends of Photography workshops that I attended in 1983. In preparation for answering the question, I consulted a notebook that I used for every workshop I’ve taken. My first session was with Ruth Bernhard, who had brought her assistant, Michael Kenna, along.

One of the things I wrote down:

How to practice:

• Be quiet — hear
• Allow yourself to be so touched by something so completely that you can’t talk yourself out of it.
• Go alone.
• Leave plenty of time.
• Return to the places that work for you.
• Don’t let yourself become callused or immune to places, things, situations.
• Don’t intellectualize; photograph life, not things.
• Don’t photograph for your audience.
• You can keep some photographs secret.
• Expose means reveal.
• Don’t reveal what is already known.
• Find your own poem.
• Nothing is finished; everything is in the process of becoming.

Good advice.