I like your point about the tool being in service to the vision. I think too many in the photography world lose sight of that as we get caught up in the latest whiz-bang features in the digicam world, and I’m glad to see things swinging back toward the vision direction. Perhaps one thing that accounts for the focus on gear is that the gear (including the processing software) has become so advanced in such a short amount of time that it has overwhelmed many photographers, so that they have had to focus on the gear because there is simply such an overwhelming amount of new, complex information to learn around these tools (gear/software).

My own feeling is that the limitations of a tool you use to create art or the very medium in which you work often lead the artist to a level of ingenuity and imagination that they would not have achieved otherwise if they had had a tool that easily overcame these limitations. An example might be, say, a formal structure in poetry (such as the sonnet form), whose limitations the poet must work within in order to exercise the full range of their vision and imagination. In this sense, in my photography at least, I find that it is often helpful to me to impose some sort of limitations (whether via gear or subject or whatever) to inspire me to work with the limitations and try to transcend them through my own vision and imagination.

Also, wanted to add that your blog and your books have really inspired me to become more aware of these issues in my own artistic work, so thank you for being such an inspiration to me and to so many others. Keep up the great work!

You’re right about the dichotomy of gear and vision, but what I really mean to address when I talk about it is not whether we use one or the other, simply the place of one (gear) in service of the other (vision and expression) – I can geek out like the rest of the photography world, but at the end of the day it’s what I use the camera for that matters.

Thanks for the note!

Had to laugh about you mentioning the “20-year-old Pentax K-10000″ at the end. I still use my THIRTY year old Pentax K-1000 with the original 50mm lens right alongside my DSLR and iPhone. I love that camera not so much for its sturdy engineering (it’s a little indestructible tank) but for what it engenders in me when I make photographs with it: all of its settings are manual, so it doesn’t do any of your thinking for you, and absolutely forces you to slow down and think through your shot before pressing the shutter. It doesn’t even advance the film automatically. I find I need a day of shooting with that camera every once in a while so that my vision has a chance to center itself and to prevent myself from getting lazy and taking the easy way out with my shots (too easy to just keep snapping away with a digital camera, with the thought in the back of my mind that “I’ll just fix it in software later”).

I guess in this sense, I believe that the dichotomy between “gear” and “vision” that you often bring up is a bit oversimplified in that the tools we use (and their capabilities and limitations) definitely shape our vision and how we tap into it.

You are so right. Avedon was a master at getting someone to relax so that the viewer looked right into that person’s soul. I know because of a personal interaction that I was so fortunate to experience before he died.

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