This is a story about how I eventually resurrected and re-established my own intuitive core vision. It is also the telling of a creative visual inner quest that was undertaken one unsteady and if truth be told tiny step at a time.

In glancing back over my life I am amazed that I can recall exactly when and how it was that I arrived here from. But it is like trying to remember back to your earliest childhood. Some memories are still clear and quite vivid but others simply become lost in the dimness of time passing, whispers of a life lived, stored in cluttered organic memory banks. Ever receding memory fragments of remembrances slowly dissolving into flickering recollections, the faintest of faded shadows of a once having been lived tangible reality.

I grew up fascinated and intrigued by, in fact have spent most of my life immersed in photography's frozen moments of a once reality, captured and surviving now only as paper images. My complete focus in life has always centred around something or other to do with it. Even today after close to fifty years of constantly working with it, somehow this simplistic in concept and yet very enigmatic image capturing medium still has the ability to bewitch and engage my every thought. It brings forth from within me the penchant to dare and reveal quite nakedly just who I am to myself. And yes I must confess that I have been surprised by what I have found.

It seems that vision alone can seem to justify and reaffirm my worldly existence. Building and teasing, creating a mental stimulation of none other than blatant organically based excited voyeurism. Wanting and yearning for ever more visual experiences to look at and view, any and everything that my all seeing eyes can consume. Always hopeful for those few seconds of eventual climatic release during the bountiful Cosmic visions on this Earth that I have been a conscious desiring witness too.

Ultimately though I am a trying and difficult disciple; while I was willing to give my life to the world of photography I also demand more from it than just blind obedience to the well-known traditional ways. Daring to not only try and root out and find my own inner core founded visions, but to become part of the growing contingent that is trying to bring about a true equivalency between formalised fine art and the mechanically based visual scribe that has become known as photography. Expecting, hopefully not in vain, that the medium's dedicated flock of avid practitioners and followers does not continue to simply underestimate the potential and intense creative proficiency that awaits in it's folds for us mere mortals. If we could only understand and tap into the genuine visual realm, instead of simply being content with copying those surface layers of one's living journey.

What grieves me is that you can find most photographic disciples hiding out, seeking company in like minded closet sized photographic ghettos or photo based feasts trying to shore up and bolster even buffing up surface glitter found residing there in their own toned silvered reflections. All the while deep inside at their cores no doubt harbouring feelings of ultimate and inevitable artistic inadequacies as they huddle together for strength in greater numbers.

Until we understand the difference between merely using the medium or carefully guiding it to fulfill it's destiny, until we move forward from the simple "photo-copy" mentality, until the user truly respects and has a genuine love for photography, until all this is part of an overall artistic commitment, we can not expect to shape and mold the course of photography's fine art evolution. Ultimately only by having both the fine art echelon and photographic minded sensibilities truly coupled as one knit fast and tightly bonded unit, will the medium truly soar out to it's full human creative potential. The truth is you can not create truly great art work by just casually or even mechanically using the photographic medium.

SETTING THE STAGE; A LITTLE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY

Stepping back in history approximately one hundred and sixty five fiery sun life giving revolutions ago, we humans conceived created and birthed a new form of mechanical and chemical based image capturing system. Something to catch and hold fast the latent whispers of light echoing off of an observed reality, seconds of time that were chemically induced and coaxed into an ephemeral parchment like existence. With time passing an industrially based chemical founded image capturing technology slowly unfolded. And all from those first fuzzy images caught and frozen, held fast in emulsion bound moments of fleeting Cosmic cadence, trapped, stilled there by humanly conscious ingenuity.

This capturing ability was a creation that in the beginning most people thought would quickly put an end to hand eye co-ordinated fine art. But in truth the future did not play out that way. Instead quite the opposite occurred, fine art was itself in true irony set free, pried loose from its confining shackles of having to simply record the mundane subject or be the human world's literal copyist.

Photography sprung forth from human scientific ingenuity and inevitably was much superior at this literal style of straight forward object reproduction. However in turn it also chained and shackled its own practitioners with the complex tasking of its overflowing paraphernalia and the darkness entailed drudgery of its image processing. Quickly as well the medium fell easy pray to industrial entrepreneurism and once they had formulated and formatted an industrially molded ease of use, the medium quickly gained instant mass wide appeal.

Unfortunately unlike museum level fine art and its sister art and artistic companion of commercially based graphic art, this new image capturing technology has never managed to properly separate and divorce itself from the more blatant mercenary avaricious minded aspects of its continual and on going use. Photographic sight and seeing indeed that slick, superficial artsy visualisation which is commonly used to display and help sell a never ending host of products and personages has simply overlapped and become ingrained and incorporated into, literally knitting and melding itself clearly and shamelessly to the fine art arena of this relatively new medium.

Photography as art has ended up on a convoluted path. It is a bitter pill to swallow and it has given me many sleepless nights but I fear the medium is destined for a damaged fine art future. During my own photographic journey I have frequently observed the rivalry between the visually based fine art photographic users and the highly technical craft-like photographers with a hunt and shoot "photocopy" style of artistic image creation.

On one half of the equation the serious minded photographers have a tendency to be procedurally based, trying for technically perfect printmaking methods combined with a traditional image style of artistic creation. They simply end up becoming artistically stifled and boring. The other fine art types while more daring in artistic conception and certainly visually progressive in creative visual attitudes, literally shun and dismiss the medium's technical methodology. They then have the nerve to turn around and present the world with industrially made mass produced art; where the artist is virtually irrelevant in the birthing process. This disrespectful attitude can only create art that is ultimately still born; because it lacks one of the key fundamentals of artistic creation.

The medium has it's own inherent possibilities and endless visual creative pathways. It is confined only by individuals who's guidance is obstructed by limited aesthetic horizons. Photography's fateful blooming destiny, it's true history, still lays waiting for creative dynamic energy to come along pick it up and rescue it.

JUST A FEW WORDS ABOUT WHO I AM

I find myself reluctant to participate in society in general, it seems to provide little in the way of genuineness that I desire around me in my life, I tend to gravitate to my hermit ways and frankly prefer it that way. I still however, have faith regarding creation, destiny, and being.

We surly must all feel, at some point even for just moments, the utter uniqueness of our own existence. We can only trust that we are being lead sincerely onto the eventual unfolding of our own cosmic awareness and presumably an ultimate inner core enlightenment awaits for us. For me, there is no doubt this all stems from my well meaning creative yearnings and ambitions as well as my conscious mirage of actually being alive and believing that I do exist for a purpose here and now. And that I have through some sort of genuinely fateful action been coaxed into awareness in this particular place and all for a true Cosmic purpose which is to be slowly played out in this time frame.

Believing all of this is actually surprisingly somehow comforting, like a salve protecting my soul. I feel, no I know for certain that I am on my true path. At a place situated at the very boundaries of human illusive reasoning, located somewhere at the end of known time, near the very edge of all that there is. I believe I am proceeding onto a location where all will no doubt in its own time slowly peel back and, I am bold enough to speculate, will eventually be revealing its warm inviting comforting moistened waiting nakedness to me.

MY FATEFUL DESTINY

I have worked on many photographic portfolios over the years which were all quite nicely finished, especially so in regards to the subject theme being mindfully chosen and the subject matter searched out, hunted down and slowly carefully painstakingly gathered. Then with labour intensive archival print making, lovingly fussed over to bring them to life as signed and editioned portfolios. When I look back over the various work I see the commitment and care that was taken in producing the work. But I also sense something of a finite blinkered visual reality existing in that basic photocopy level in the artistic side of the photographic world.

I feel my true creative world was resurrected or virtually rebirthed only when I began to break the scenes before me into pieces and play creatively with those small sections. This image combining methodology literally took me back to my much earlier almost innocent intuitive roots and helped me reclaim and ignite an inner creative energy. It was as if once again I could dare to see into the heart of visual creativity and also surprisingly peer more deeply into my own core. Once again I could sense that visual mental orgasm and feel a creative high and ecstasy flooding over me, but this time I knew exactly what kind of vision that I was reaching out to grasp.

However, let us at this point retrace the early steps and revisit my fading and waning recollections to try and share how I came to end up exactly where it is that I now find myself creatively poised.

While I have been through a period of not knowing just how to "label" myself, in the very beginning it was very clear that all I wanted to be was a photographer, essentially someone who simply took pictures using a camera. I wanted to know all about the little devise that was able to capture and store veiled images of a reality that were at one time in front of the "camera" and its holder. I wanted to learn and know how to process the film, then work the magic with chemicals and papers and hold this tangible likeness of reality in my hands.

I had no inkling of the depths to which this photographic obsession would eventually drive and guide me. At a young and tender age I questioned photographic imagery, worried that it all seemed to be derived from the same modes of traditional but in my mind boring conception. It was about then that the often repeating dreams of complex imagery started to surface in my youthful consciousness. In one of the repeating dreams I saw myself making a wall sized picture by using family scrapbook photos. The little pictures all came together on a wall to create a large sized montage made up of black and white drugstore processed photographs. However it was only when you backed away from all of those little overlapping family images that you could make out a faint visage coming from the ethers of something or somebody looking back at you. It was a powerful sensation, a premonition of my future that has stayed with me all of these years.

I have always felt the sharpness of a prick on the end of the silver tipped photo hook, poking and metaphorically driving me to be more creative regardless of the consequences. At times, in my teen years it was reminiscent of exactly how an ulcer feels, an acid like hole burning in your stomach. Only this was a mental fire, burning inside me to create something, a flaming drive that has never ever let up.

But in truth in the early years I was also hooked by the gear or paraphernalia and photographica itself. I moaned for it, longed for it, as one would any lover. I remember once telling my mother quite earnestly that I was deeply in love, when she asked with scepticism and parental interest, for I was very young then. "That's nice tell me dear with whom", I replied , "Oh you wouldn't know, it's called a Nikon F." "You are in love with a…a… what….a camera?" "Yes." I innocently replied with my naïve youthful bluster all the while clutching an advertising image of the camera. I had torn it out of a photo magazine and carried it around just to look at it constantly and keep it close to my youthful beating breast. I was in love after all.

The first photograph that I can actually consciously remember taking was when I was ten at the time and on a ship returning from a trip to England. It was my second crossing of the North Atlantic to stay with my large maternal family. Using a Kodak Box Brownie camera I clicked a picture of an iceberg. All the while listening to a much older man, who said that he was one of the few male Titanic survivors, telling me that we must be very near the spot in the ocean where that great ship had floundered.

I can also remember the first time in my father's home basement workshop using an old beat up hand me down wired together enlarger and some tiny mismatched processing trays. With scant knowledge of photographic techniques I watched as my first black and white print appear out of the chemical ethers and expose its silver self to me. It was a pivotal moment. From that point to this day I was literally captivated, seduced into submission by the chemical and paper magic trick and no doubt by the power of capturing and holding reality.

At the age of thirteen or fourteen I began earnestly to take photos. I had a Japanese range finder camera, a birthday gift from my father purchased after much coaxing on my behalf. By the time I was in my late teens my days were spent working very industriously, mimicking a blind ant worker who toils out of necessity. My first photographic employment was with a photo studio doing interiors of industrial work places one day, photographing refurbished hotel rooms the next and then working on a furniture catalogue shoot a few days later. Then clothes and model work during the following week. A few years later I moved onto several advertising photo houses who were dealing with agency work.

I can tell you that working daily in a photo studio influences you, how can it not? If you spend hours, days, years producing glossy slick imagery that is meant simply to sell something you can not easily rid yourself of that sort of mental and visual ideology over night. On the weekends or in my spare time I fancied myself as more than just someone who photographed whatever I was told to. But it was just not possible to fully strip off and rid myself of one type of visual thinking and quickly replace it with another. It is impossible for a day to day working commercial photographer to cleanly step into the shoes of a genuine fine art photographer. And the reverse is also true. It is not possible for a full time fine art image maker to easily step into the shoes of a commercial photographer. Both of those working modes require mastering different creative skill sets to do them complete justice.

MY INITIAL EARLY EKTACOLOUR WORK

Luckily for me and helped along by my anti-social temperament and an acute overly sensitive nature regarding human to human contact, I only weathered ten years in the commercial photography world.

My first "fine art" portfolio created in the late 1960s came forth instinctively from within a genuine creative but young and naive core. The work had no name tag that I could give it. It was not in the realm of traditional photography in the conventional sense, but in my mind was a blending and knitting together of both creative vision and photographic technique.

Using the commercially available Ektacolour printing process I started doing multiple exposure images on colour printing paper. By combining different images I literally created my own way of seeing. I then further enhanced the result by using lithe film and hand bleaching for masking purposes or I used transparency film but developed it as a negative and then sandwiched that together with solarized colour negative film and threw in conventionally processed black and white film. In this hand done method I was able to create unearthly, Martian-like atmospheres in my colour images. Sometimes with great success, but often just failures. Each time I tried something I came across new ideas and was then able to apply that knowledge on the next creation.

However, unless you are independently wealthy or have a source of income from outside employment, the burden of day-to-day survival can be extremely rough for those driven to forsake everything in order to formulate and master the creation of photographic art. In my case, I had something else, a working spouse who shared with me total financial and mental support. We both made a commitment and I left the world of business driven photography and entered one that centred around a personal artistic photographic pathway.

ABOUT MAKING THE BREAK TO FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY

Of course I showed my non commercial colour work to some of the early photographic curators. And it was at this point that something began to change within me. While I had initially been very bold with my imagery, my youthful innocence lacked strength of conviction. Seeking praise for my work I was shown more traditional photographic image concepts, both technically and visually.

My youthful ambitions were influenced by the traditional thinking that black and white imagery empowered the difference between commercial and fine art photography. And that image making had to be choosing a particular subject theme and then literally "photocopying" the same kind of thing over and over again rather than my early approach to creation which was to conceptualise a theme and work it out one image at a time using multiple printing techniques.

The hesitation and reticence of the museums to collect colour work in the early seventies affected my creative direction. I remember showing my early works at the Museum Of Modern Art in the late 1960s and was told if I really wanted to do something for photography that I would come up with a full colour process that was more permanent than the one I was currently using. I lament now, if only what they had wanted was a new way of photographic visualising or deeper seeing. But alas all they were interested in was just a more permanent colour process.

MY PROCESS ORIENTATED YEARS

So the hunt was on to find a permanent colour process. Several of the alternative photographic processes, cyanotype, platinum, and gum printing snagged my youthful attention. After much experimentation I would commit myself to full colour gum printing. It suited me personally, an all hands on printing method where you are in control of every single aspect of a prints creation. I got to a point where I could produce a permanent gum based colour print that literally rivalled the more impermanent chromogenic colour processes. And just as I was getting somewhere with it the museums came to the startling realisation they could indeed collect dye based chromogenic colour work as long as they stored them in temperature and humidity controlled cold storage vaults or in vacuum sealed bags in a deep freezer.

While I reached new heights of working with the gum process my image path remained influenced by convention. Attached to each of the processes were its own set of images, more or less traditional looking combinations of twenty four pictures all in small signed editions. I can actually count at least sixteen different photographic portfolios I have completed between 1967 and 1989. Each of them photographed carefully and lovingly, painstakingly hand printed and then signed and editioned. All the while travelling hundreds of thousands of miles all the way out to the abyss of creative repetition and back just to find and gather up yet another group of traditional photographic looking images.

I was good at this. I made my way along the path following in the time warn footsteps involved with equipment, processes, and the traditional simple click style imagery. Picture making that's evolved from searching, finding, and then clicking the shutter. I worked with 6x6cm, 4x5, 12x20, 5x7, 8x10 camera models. I alternated between old photographic processes and contemporary black and white toned silver work. The changes of equipment, alternative processes or finding a new subject matter to "click" had replaced my intuitive creative instincts. I tried to fill the void of internal core based creativity with external equipment and travel satisfaction. I was left continually searching for something I knew existed but could not define at that time. Like reaching out for an orgasm that you know exists but just will not take hold.

I produced my first full colour gum dichromate portfolio in 1980. Twenty selected portraits taken at various theme parks in the Eastern seaboard of America. Each image was 30x30 inches in scale printed in editions of ten. I laboriously printed all of the full colour gum prints before moving on to something else. It swallowed two years of my life.

I recall travelling one hundred thousand miles over a two year period throughout Canada and much of North America photographing "Joints", the gaming booths you find at the little country fairs. I did them using an 8x10 Deardorff field camera and a large flash set up to illuminate the insides of the tents. Eventually producing a 30x40 inch portfolio of beautifully selenium toned silver prints all signed and editioned. I was praised and encouraged to keep working on the same subject with the eventual hope of producing a photographic book.

It all became more about just trying to get there, in a position to take the image, spending time to obtain permission to photograph, and more about finding the funds to travel. The image became a secondary concern, my creative emphasis fell into the procedural aspects.

However, I had a constant battle blazing within myself as to just exactly what photography was and just where it fit in the creative fine art realm. There were times I adamantly believed that the black and white photo copy style of photographic image creation was all there was and even insisted that was all it should be. On the other hand I had my moments, alone in the dead of night where I saw a wall full of interrelated images and the creative image potential which that dream of vision entailed.

Was I going to just continually keep adding to the conventional image conception supporting the silver-based traditional foundation that belonged to the history of photography? Or could I allow myself the freedom to remove the shackles I had imposed from those external influences and possibly reach into the inner core of my own creativity? Could I keep committing my life and energy (and it was a lot of hard toil) to always working on so bloody little in respect to my creative abilities?

It literally took me six more years to finally find an answer to these questions. In the mean time though I simply moved away from the "Joint" photographing to something else.

INDIA

As I pondered what I would do next a chance encounter with a travel brochure send me down another visual path. I learnt there were fifty thousand festivals each year in India and it became the "thing" to chase in my mind. The research began, a trip was planned for 1984.

In truth I started off photographing in India exactly the same way I had worked in North America. I worked that way for six years, producing four different portfolios. The first images were of specific Hindu festivals; I printed these in black and white toned silver. The second imagery centred around a Hindu festival in Calcutta called the Kali Puja. I printed these in the full colour gum process. The third, another portfolio of full colour gum prints, portraits of the people of Calcutta. Then I turned to the ancient Indian icons I found while travelling around the country side and printed them in large (48"x60") free form gum prints.

I had enough work from India to secure a major museum show, one that would eventually tour across Canada. The image content had been chosen, the catalogue all laid out, and the theme pieced together from the work I had all ready completed. But I awoke one hot Summer night in a sheer panic. Cradling my head in my hands my soul screamed out, "why should I always have to gear my inner creative self to, as I saw it, somebody else's pedestrian visual ideals?" I was hungry and yearned to provide more than I had been doing.

I couldn't convince the museum of photography to support my idea of returning once more to photograph and to do it differently this time. I tried to describe what I could see in my mind, large photographic colour murals, pieces that overlapped and created their own vision. I was not successful in convincing them, but for the first time in many years I knew what I had to do.

The murals would represent a scale that actually suited my particular vision and I hoped would also make me proud. So I went back to India in spite of everything that was standing in my way, returning to the Kali Puja, working in a manner that would eventually resurrect and salvage my own inner intuitive creativity from photographic traditionalism. And oh yes, the museum did in the end include three of the new murals in the final show.

In the past I had always been unable to commit to subject matter in a meaningful sense, that is until I travelled to India. On our first trip we visited Calcutta (now renamed Kolicutt) to attend one of the largest Hindu festivals, Durga Puja. Eating dinner one night an older American chemist and his wife sitting at our hotel communal table questioned why we were not staying on for the upcoming Kali Puja. Frankly we had never heard of this Goddess but from his descriptions decided to alter our route and return to Calcutta two weeks later. That first encounter with Kali and the religious festival that surrounds her was like a visual feast and represents to me my first genuine photographic commitment.

It was here I encountered Kali's faithful attendants, her Yoginis. I related instantly to these grotesque deities that acted as her guardians, they were visually hideous but spiritually they were fighting for goodness over evil. In truth they are generally misunderstood (I could personally very easily relate to this) and visually they stimulated, excited and enticed me with their repulsive appearance. I was drawn to them exactly like a moth to a flame. Under their spell I kept returning to visit year after year captivated by their earthy visual allure.

Kali herself is a powerful Hindu Goddesses. She is a metaphorical symbol and representation for all of Cosmic creation, preservation, and destruction. From that symbolism came my visual pathway. Now let me make this clear, this was not a religious experience for me. I was not in the least interested in Hinduism. I am not a religious convert. But I was definitely caught in a visual photographic spell inspired by Hinduism's earth bound folk art.

In my younger years I had listened attentively to the curators, gallery owners, and well meaning collectors. At forty, with India on my creative plate seducing me and satisfying a visual hunger I no longer heard their words of caution; especially the thought that if I did not stop photographing in India that I would have no career.

Today I can acknowledge that they were right; but only about aspirations for having financial stability. My goal in life had always been very clear, to arrive at a point with my work that would appease and satisfy the creative demons who always taunted me for even more than I could ever hope to offer them.

This commitment, perhaps it was more of a visual obsession, ultimately pushed me over the edge creatively. I simply literally became that Hindu Goddess Kali. I find a scene that captures my imagination, the thing itself before me, but instead of one click to captured it on film, I literally photographically dissected it into pieces. Each section kept as a complete whole, the photographic integrity being paramount. Back in the studio I print the scene and assemble it just as it was photographed. It is at this point that the destruction and creative evolution begins. I dissolve and then rearrange the image in front of me to recreate images never before seen.

My first mural works were created using nine, twelve, or fifteen 30x40 inch sections. I used an 8x10 inch Deardorff view camera to slowly capture each section piece by piece. These finished murals measured eight by ten, twelve, or sixteen feet when finished and I printed them in the full colour gum dichromate process. It was a time consuming activity. The actual photographing of the scene took three to four hours per mural. The printing itself took many months to accomplish and was extremely expensive because of the large colour separation negatives.

It was not long before I switched to a 35 mm camera to capture the images. The camera had finally become just the image recording tool and I was making equipment decisions based on creative intelligence. Although still using a tripod in my work I began to fracture the images into smaller and smaller pieces, often capturing eight hundred images on a given subject.

The creative juices that had laid quiet for so long became organically alive, like a profuse excited spurting wet gush. I decided to come out of the metaphorical closet. I did not discard tradition, but my personal suffocation only stopped when I began to reformulate my vision. I was on my way, soaring out towards my unleashed creativity. It felt good to be unveiled. The probing questions of my searching seemed inconsequential to the act of actually creating. The need to define exactly what photographic image creation really meant more or less dissolved into the impetus of being able to shape my own visual world. I no longer wondered who I was? I knew the answer and so could knowingly and confidently return home from my travels.

MY DOG TAJ AND MOTHER EARTH

It was around this time that I came across a waif like snow white fluffy stray dog roaming around outside the studio. At first thought I ignored him, hoping he would simply move on. But within the hour I was out searching the local neighbourhood in the pouring rain. I knew that as a responsible being I had to deal with what I had seen. We dutifully cornered and then took him to the local animal control shelter thinking someone would surly come and claim him. At the end of each day I called the centre to learn of his plight. On day four, the last day they would keep him alive I went out and paid to adopt that little dog.

It wasn't really what we needed; we had five cats and another mouth to feed would only strain our already tight food budget. However, as it turned out Taj became a pivotal catalyst creatively. Anyone with a dog knows they have to be walked. So Taj and I walked, short walks but many times a day. We walked to the park at the end of our studio building. It's a river park with forested areas, wild flowers, and trails twisting and meandering along the river bank.

It was during these walks with Taj that visual notions of continually changing ephemeral landscape reasserted themselves back into my creative consciousness. Without a camera in my hands I watched carefully as the seasons changed. The land presented itself to me as a mature fully rounded female body who then exhibited herself stark naked in the fall winter and spring seasons right in front of my creative reasoning for further consideration. I became firmly mentally aroused in anticipation of the sheer joy of what was beginning to occur before my eyes. It was as if another dimension leading out to visual infinity had swung open allowing me to see through the wind billowing veil separating this dimension and an other, seeing if only briefly, into a different visual realm, one so close at hand. It had been there all along, but all it needed was to have the traditional layers being peeled away.

DEFEATING THE IMAGE

Where I am right now in my thoughts on this medium is that creativity should be driven and formed from an inner personal vision and not by relying on simply photocopying the external subject matter. In truth the image itself that's in front of the camera has always in the end defeated photographers, they have not fought and wrestled to eventually defeat and master the image. I also believe that one should commit to having an intimate technical knowledge of the medium. Only when these two points of view are married can the creative conduit, yourself, rise and soar on the artistic thermals.

In traditional modes of fine art photographic thinking and working, the subject matter itself seems to be the dominating factor exerting integral authority and dominance over creative sensibilities. The found thing or chosen subject should only be the raw material in the mix for eventual artistic creation. Otherwise the photographic method of actually doing becomes the "thing" that is in full control of the creation. It has the photographer fussing with equipment, tweaking the process and bleeding their creative energies and powers away from the art work itself. In turn when you have disrespect or a disinterest and lack commitment to the technical know-how, just using photographic methodology as an easy to employ reproduction tool, control of creation is weakened and the medium's integrity becomes compromised. It is a delicate balance to ensure that you are not defrauding the medium of it's true creative potential and worth.

In order to rise on artistic thermals and glide out to visual infinity the photographer must learn to defeat that external image by exerting their own creative power and authority over the final outcome. Creation is about the magic of original inner inspiration. It should stem from within the image creator, the photographer, the artist. The individual must master and become the driving and controlling force, generating the impetus towards harnessing those motivational drives from one's inner intuitive aesthetic sensibilities and doing so from a firm foundation of respect, even dare I say it, with ardent love for the medium of photography.