Image  via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Musi­cians can often become con­sumed by GAS—or “gear acqui­si­tion syn­drome”—obsess­ing over equip­ment for years instead of mak­ing music with what they have. This is dri­ven in part by the intim­i­dat­ing snob­bery of gear elit­ists, and in part by con­sumer mar­ket­ing seek­ing to con­vince us that we nev­er have enough. It seems that the pho­tog­ra­phy world also suf­fers from GAS, and, as a 1962 pitch let­ter to Pop Pho­to mag­a­zine by Hunter S. Thomp­son shows us—writes the pho­tog­ra­phy blog Peta Pix­el—“the land­scape of the pho­to world half a cen­tu­ry ago may not have been too dif­fer­ent from what we see today.”

In such a land­scape, gonzo jour­nal­ist, “exis­ten­tial­ist life coach,” and hob­by­ist pho­tog­ra­ph­er Thomp­son became a stren­u­ous advo­cate for the spar­tan art of snap­shot pho­tog­ra­phy. He wrote his pitch let­ter to Pop Pho­to in response to an arti­cle by Ralph Hat­ter­s­ley called “Good & Bad Pic­tures,” and to pro­pose his own essay on the sub­ject with the pos­si­ble title “The Case for the Chron­ic Snap­shoot­er.”

He first describes the feel­ing imposed on him by the New York pho­to world that “no man should ever punch a shut­ter release with­out many years of instruc­tion and at least $500 worth of the finest equip­ment.” In such an elit­ist envi­ron­ment, he became “embar­rassed to be seen on the street with my rat­ty equip­ment” and “stopped tak­ing pic­tures alto­geth­er.” Hattersley’s piece, however—which “cites Weegee and Cartier-Bresson”—convinced him that “snap­shoot­ing is not, by def­i­n­i­tion, a low and igno­rant art.” He revis­it­ed his prints, he writes, “and decid­ed that not all of them were worth­less. As a mat­ter of fact there were some that gave me great plea­sure.”

That’s my idea in a nut­shell. When pho­tog­ra­phy gets so tech­ni­cal as to intim­i­date peo­ple, the ele­ment of sim­ple enjoy­ment is bound to suf­fer. Any man who can see what he wants to get on film will usu­al­ly find some way to get it; and a man who thinks his equip­ment is going to see for him is not going to get much of any­thing.

The moral here is that any­one who wants to take pic­tures can afford ade­quate equip­ment and can, with very lit­tle effort, learn how to use it. Then, when the pic­tures he gets start resem­bling the ones he saw in his mind’s eye, he can start think­ing in terms of those added improve­ments that he may or may not need.

You can read Thompson’s full let­ter here. His advice to would-be pho­tog­ra­phers not only offers inspi­ra­tion to ama­teurs and hob­by­ists; it also gives us a phi­los­o­phy of pho­to­graph­ic art (and art more gen­er­al­ly) as an exten­sion of our nat­ur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ties, or “mind’s eye.” His “moral” might apply broad­ly to any cre­ative endeav­or like­ly to be stymied by GAS.

Thomp­son makes the case that what­ev­er we can afford can get us where we need to go: “Why give up because you can’t afford a cam­era with a 1.8 or 1.4 lens?” he writes, “First push 3.5 to its absolute lim­it, and if it still bugs you, you’ll find some way to buy that oth­er cam­era. If not, you don’t need it any­way.” He acknowl­edges that his the­sis “will rub some of your high-priced adver­tis­ers the wrong way,” but writes that shut­ter­bugs who can­not get results on low­er-priced gear will only be dis­ap­point­ed when they fail sim­i­lar­ly with the high-priced stuff.”

The push to shop instead of cre­ate com­pels us to obsess over what we don’t have—Thompson urges us to learn to make the very best with what we do.

You can see some of Thomp­son’s pho­tographs here.

via Peta Pix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hunter S. Thompson’s Ball­sy & Hilar­i­ous Job Appli­ca­tion Let­ter (1958)

John­ny Depp Reads Let­ters from Hunter S. Thomp­son

Read 11 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How to take pho­tographs like Ansel Adams did? The ques­tion dogs many who’ve recent­ly picked up the cam­era, espe­cial­ly those direct­ly inspired to do so by he whose black-and-white land­scapes prac­ti­cal­ly defined the Amer­i­can West for the 20th cen­tu­ry. Con­ve­nient­ly, though, Adams left behind much to study, and not just his con­sid­er­able body of work; he also spoke with­out hes­i­ta­tion about the tech­niques he devel­oped and employed, and even fur­ther explained them in books like Mak­ing a Pho­to­graph; Cam­era and Lens: The Cre­ative Approach; and Exam­ples: The Mak­ing of 40 Pho­tographs, the clos­est thing we have to a mas­ter class with the man.

Adams got par­tic­u­lar results out of a pro­ce­dure he called “visu­al­iza­tion,” in which the pho­tog­ra­ph­er “sees” the final image as ful­ly as pos­si­ble in their imag­i­na­tion before attempt­ing to cap­ture that image on film in the real world. In the two clips fea­tured here, you can hear Adams him­self dis­cuss visu­al­iza­tion. “When you visu­al­ize a pho­to­graph, it is not only a mat­ter of see­ing it in the mind’s eye,” he says in the video from the Get­ty Muse­um, “but it’s also, and pri­mar­i­ly, a mat­ter of feel­ing it.” In the inter­view just above, he adds that “the pic­ture has to be there clear­ly and deci­sive­ly, and if you have enough craft in your own work and in your prac­tice, you can then make the pho­to­graph you desire.”

Here, Adams out­lines “the steps in mak­ing a pho­to­graph” in a bit more detail as fol­lows:

1. Need, or desire, to pho­to­graph. This atti­tude is obvi­ous­ly essen­tial. Some­times just going out with a cam­era can excite per­cep­tive inter­est and the desire to work. An assignment—a purpose—can be the great­est stim­u­lus for func­tion­al or cre­ative work.
2. Dis­cov­ery of the sub­ject, or recog­ni­tion of its essen­tial aspects, will evoke the con­cept of the image. This leads to the explo­ration of the sub­ject and the opti­mum point of view.
3. Visu­al­iza­tion of the final pic­ture is essen­tial in what­ev­er medi­um is used. The term “see­ing” can be used for visu­al­iza­tion, but the lat­ter term is more pre­cise in that it relates to the final picture—its scale, com­po­si­tion, tonal and tex­tur­al val­ues, etc. Just as a musi­cian “hears” notes and chords in his mind’s eye, so can the trained pho­tog­ra­ph­er “see” cer­tain val­ues, tex­tures, and arrange­ments in his mind’s eye.

For more infor­ma­tion still on Adams’ artis­tic process, see also Ansel Adams, Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, the 1958 doc­u­men­tary we fea­tured here in 2013. None of this mate­r­i­al, of course, guar­an­tees you the abil­i­ty to take pho­tographs exact­ly like Ansel Adams, but you would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want to: we do our best work, after all, not when we do exact­ly what our great­est pre­de­ces­sors did, but when we think how our great­est pre­de­ces­sors thought. Hence the impor­tance of visu­al­iza­tion, which you can do right now with­out buy­ing the exact mod­el of Zeiss Mil­liflex Adams used or going to the exact spots in Yosemite from which he shot — you only need to think.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ansel Adams Reveals His Cre­ative Process in 1958 Doc­u­men­tary

Dis­cov­er Ansel Adams’ 226 Pho­tos of U.S. Nation­al Parks (and Anoth­er Side of the Leg­endary Pho­tog­ra­ph­er)

Alfred Stieglitz: The Elo­quent Eye, a Reveal­ing Look at “The Father of Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy”

1972 Diane Arbus Doc­u­men­tary Inter­views Those Who Knew the Amer­i­can Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Best

Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son and the Deci­sive Moment

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.