I could say what I think of Deborah Turbeville, but what would be the point? A tiresome disagreement? Not thanks. The blackhole of discussing the definition of “artist” and “art” is best left to energetic college students.
Henri Cartier-Bresson finally quit the camera in favor of pencil and paper. I don’t know how well his drawings were regarded but it was of little consequence, surely he was content.
The problem with leaving it to the kids is this: they are kids. It'll be decades before they have seen enough through their own eyes to get a grasp on what's what. Reading about it is not going to cut it. I have read reams of newsprint, but I don't pretend to be capable of writing anything the Sunday Times would use. And therein a point: I wouldn't
want to be published by, say, a red top. If you want to do something good then it's where you need to aim - at the best of what you know exists out there. With luck, you may get close.
HC-B quit because, I imagine but do not know, he just got too old to hack it physically. Also, after a while, you reach more and more of those dry periods, blocks, where you don't do anything because you know that if you do during those times, you just keep redoing the same old thing you did for too long; too long, because you had time enough with it to get bored. I think boredom is the root of block. I see the repetitive mode in my own work as in that of so many others in the trap, here as anywhere else. The danger is that it takes a while to see what you have been doing, by which time it may be too late for you to recharge.
I once mentioned that I could go out any day of the week and never run out of shots. Indeed, new shots, but all of them in the very same bag. Maybe the same happens when you are lucky enough to find your own, personal muse. How could Bailey have ever let the Shrimp drift away? Too familiar after a few short years of intensity? Mine vanished for more prosaic reasons: marriage, childbirth... But it was devastating at the time; like losing an arm.
