“If I had one thing to say to artists, it would be to be patient. And to be ignorant of what you think you know. If you don’t get the answer that you were expecting, maybe that’s a good thing. Knowing what you’re doing is overrated.”
—Pope L

From this interview on the (excellent) Louisiana Channel. H/t Austin Kleon

And a corollary: actively seeking situations where you don’t know what you are doing, forces you to come up with novel solutions. Even when those fail, it’s often fruitful — producing happy accidents and revealing weaknesses to work on and new avenues to explore.

Great interview with Juergen Teller covering a huge amount of ground: collaboration, democratising his subject selection with ‘Go-Sees’, shooting his latest work with an iPhone, his Auschwitz project, what divides his personal and professional work, the origin story of working with Marc Jacobs, and his approach to portraiture and how it has changed.

“Be careful what you wish for, not because you’ll get it but because you’ll be turned into the thing that can get it. It’s not a process where you just ask for something and it magically appears, it’s a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.”
—Jed McKenna talking about Francis Ford Coppola

H/t Trung Phan on Not Investment Advice | E214

Poems and modern memes, both, are fundamentally group cognitive technologies. Exactly half of the enjoyment, half of the use of the thing, comes in sharing the experience once you’ve had it yourself.
—Joel Dueck, from Share poems like memes

[…] no matter what your age is, shoot your world! Capture what you see that other don’t or can’t.
—Blake Andrews

From his excellent interview with Sebastien Boncy

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust

Street Portraits: Akinyemi, Savile Row — April 2025

air and light and time and space

‘- you know, I’ve either had a family, a job, something
has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have a place and
the time to
create.’
no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your
body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment,
flood and fire.
baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

Charles Bukowski

Girona, Spain — September 2022.