This could incite a novel or a couple of sentences.
It's late - 23:11 - say the numbers on the top of the iPad, so I settle for brief: I fell into a state of fascination, after WW2, with the ads that appeared for Leica, Canon and Nikon in the American magazines that I discovered in India. Those things looked so beautiful, so desirable and so mysterious: how did they work, what did f in front of a number mean, and so forth. But above all, they just looked gorgeous.
Anyway, cameras made me aware, and then when we went back to the UK I started visiting art galleries again, which my mother had been taking me to during the war, and as she had some books on artists' lives, I obviously read them and really got into it. Sadly - perhaps - my new school in Scotland discouraged my taking art because they considered it lower than my potential... what they meant was that they preferred getting better figures in the local press for their academic prowess. So, obediently, I forgot the Van Gogh life (but not death!) and realised that career as artist was not gonna happen, quite apart from the fact that I really didn't figure I could be good enough to make a living off it. Photography became the obvious alternative, with the bonus that pretty women were going to be involved somewhere down the line.
Getting into the business was tough: nobody I knew had any idea if it could even be a business except for those guys on the High Street doing passports, weddings and babies. I wanted none of that, thanks.
So I can finish, do the few dishes and get to bed, duty done; yeah, like for Ivo, photography was originally, at least, a substitute for painting.
In retrospect, I'm glad it turned out as it did; loved the trips, the glamour that was sometimes there, and the fact of the commission, the greatest compliment anyone can pay you about your work. The absence of that in amateur life is a bummer; it gives massive urge and drive and purpose to the images.
I'd love to rock and roll again, but at least it was good whilst it lasted.
Rob
