Another great quote from Roberto Bolaño's novel Amulet:

For a moment, with a sinking heart, I thought he was going to tell me about an ex-lover. We all have an old love affair to talk about when there's nothing left to say and day is breaking.

Have you ever been so awestruck by a fellow artist's work that you felt intimidated or inferior?

Writer Maud Newton has. She confesses:

A couple weeks ago, I was reading Rupert Thomson’s gorgeously evocative, meticulously pared-down This Party’s Got to Stop.

About a third of the way through, I had to take a break. The essay I’m writing had stalled. My verbs seemed unconscionably obvious next to his, my sentences clumsy, my narrative voice about as natural as a conversation heard through a tin horn.

You're not alone, Maud. It happens to me all the time. For me it comes from looking at the work of photographers I greatly admire. For instance:

Robert Maxwell  ↓

Chris Buck  ↓

Jake Chessum  ↓

Danny Clinch  ↓

So what do you do when you suffer, as even Joan Didion too suffered, from "awe-inspired paralysis"?

Maud has her own trick.

For occasions like this, for the past couple years, I’ve kept on hand a well-reviewed novel that I don’t like or respect. It’s sitting on my desk right now, in fact. I don’t re-read it in any detail, because I don’t want it to contaminate my thinking, but flicking through the book makes me feel better about my own work, however imperfect it may be.

That's a good one if you're a writer.

As a photographer, I just take what inspires me about the work or style -- the pose, light, composition, film grain, whatever -- and file it away in my head. I may even go so far as to create an image or more in a favorite photographer's style just to get it out of my system.

The upshot here is that in the process I've (hopefully) learned something new about my craft by doing and not just looking. Even if I am only filing away the image for future reference the influence of my heroes is part of my work. Sometimes you see it in a final image, sometimes you don't.

I find great joy in the work of my favorite photographers (as Maud does in her favorite writers). It's almost as if each and every one of them is right there with me each and every time I make a photograph. Yeah, it's intimidating, but we make a damn good team.

Patti Smith, from the book Just Kids, after having visited the Museum of Art in Philadelphia for the first time at the age of 12:

I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

Just Kids is the story of Patti Smith, one of the greatest performers in music, and Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most significant and controversial photographers of our time.

This book, however, chronicles their lives before the fame and recognition. Patti and Robert are two fledgling kids living in New York City and full of a longing to live a creative life full of unconditional love and support.

   I was particularly moved by the drawing he had done on Memorial Day. I had never seen anything like it. What also struck me was the date: Joan of Arc's feast day. The same day I had promised to make something of myself before her statue.
   I told him this, and he responded that the drawing was symbolic of his own commitment to art, made on the same day. He gave it to me with out hesitation and I understood in this small space of time we had mutually surrended our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

This is an iconic image: a photograph of Patti Smith created by Robert Mapplethorpe for the cover of her debut album Horses. It and the album are classics.

I'm finishing up Patti's book, Just Kids. In it she writes about the creation of this image. It's too good to not share.

There was never any question that Robert would take the portrait for the cover of Horses, my aural sword sheathed with Robert's image. I had no sense of how it would look, just that it should be true.

We never talked about what we would do, or what it would look like. He would shoot it. I would be shot.
   I had my look in mind. He had his light in mind. That is all.

   The clouds kept moving back and forth. Something happened with his light meter and he became slightly agitated. He took a few shots. He abandoned the light meter. A cloud went by and the triangle disappeared. He said, "You know, I really like the whiteness of the shirt. Can you take the jacket off?"
   I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow.
   "It's back," he said.
   He took a few more shots.
   "I got it."
   "How do you know?"
   "I just know."
   He took twelve pictures that day.
   Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic," he said.
   When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

Larry Sultan is a master of composition.

His photographs have had a huge influence on my own work and continue to inspire and push me to this day.

He will be missed.

Dennis Hopper recently exhibited some of his photographs and paintings at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City.

I'll be honest: I've always liked Hopper. He has an impeccable eye for art in various forms -- films, painting, photography, art collecting, acting, etc. Some of the films I saw him in when I was younger -- Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, and Blue Velvet -- certainly gave him some good cred in my book.

So getting the chance to look at some of his photographs was especially intriguing to me. One, because I'm a photographer. Two, because all of the photos in the exhibit were from the early to late 1960s, a time period when he was an up and coming actor and artist and before his breakthrough directorial debut with Easy Rider.

This first batch is especially interesting in that he made the photographs in the '60s and revisited them in 2009 to paint his immense "billboard paintings." He has a photorealism thing going on mixed with a bit of Ed Ruscha's influence (whom himself is a subject of one of Hopper's photograph/billboard painting combos below).

I think it's kind of amusing that these photo/painting combinations are of visual artists. Some of the greatest ones, in fact. Hopper was definitely hanging around the right crowd in '60s art world. No doubt his growing stature in Hollywood at the time offered him some choice access to the stars of art and entertainment of the time.

Ultimately, the world doesn't need more images of celebrities. However, these images capture a time before celebrity saturated our lives.

Through Hopper's eyes we see the personalities before/beyond publicists and movie plugs and more like our confidants and friends. They were just that to Hopper and, for a fraction of a second, they're ours, too.

I always want to make photos — whether it’s for an ad campaign, a magazine assignment, corporate portraits, or personal work.

Sometimes just finding a friend, a cool location, and some beautiful light does the trick.

© Armando Bellmas

© Armando Bellmas

© Armando Bellmas