“Youth is a country. I used to live there. Its inhabitants can’t wait to migrate. Its exiles long to return.”
—I. Allan Sealy, The Brainfever Bird

Long ago, just as I entered that featureless desert called After College, I wandered up to the open door of an empty theater. Inside was chaos. I asked what was happening and someone told me that they were getting ready to open in three weeks. “Help us,” he said, so I did. And for the next two years I lived at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven.

I was enchanted at once, but my learning really began when the apprentices, of which I was one, were given an acting class (in lieu of pay). In this class we learned shape shifting and transformation. The teacher would tell us “Be a lion, a monster, a child, be a Fear. Speak to us with your back. Run yelling through a space and change it.”

This was so much better than college. I’d never run yelling through the classrooms there. In college I studied other’s knowledge, not my own.

In theater, I saw at once that college wasn’t going to help me. But everything I needed for transforming myself was already in me, though I certainly didn’t remember having learned it. If I needed to find an old crone, or a monster or a magician or a wind, a young boy or a troubled heart, I’d just think of them and there they’d be. If I needed to be someone who was lost and didn’t know what to do, I knew just what to do.

Best of all, if I needed someone who was my complete opposite, there he’d be, with me in an instant. You can learn a lot from someone who is nothing like you, especially if they’re you. I, who never seemed angry, could find fury and become it. Then I could take it off like a costume.

Growing up always seems to involve setting magic aside. After my first year the theater offered me the job of production stage manager, and managing just seemed so adult that I took it. And I began scheduling rehearsals, running shows, attending production meetings. It was a capital-J job that went on for 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. It was still great, but although I was near creativity, I wasn’t creating myself. I’d lost that magic—at 25.

So photography, when I found it, was a grace. I didn’t need to organize anything to do it. Quite the opposite. And photography set me squarely into the real world while lifting my imagination into the air. It was the perfect form for me.

Until it wasn’t. Until it stopped expanding me and began to be a limitation. Through some mysterious devolution I found myself managing again instead of exploring; jobs, clients, employees, a studio. And when I went out to shoot on my own, it was as though I took an invisible client along. This client wanted his photo, just like all the others. The client was me, the Photographer, full of ambitions and plans.

I realized this one day when I walked into a tiny mountain church in southern México. There were sounds—worshipers chanting the soft tones of Tzotzil—candle flames like spirits in the foggy light, the smell of the pine needles strewn on the floor. And I looked around and thought, “Hey, where’s the photograph here?” I was so lost in photography that I missed the magic.

Oh well, it happens.

How lucky for me, then, that I had discovered the antidote long before I needed it. I’d gotten it back in that theater, though I hadn’t known it at the time. Here’s how it evolved:

I had been asked to teach. And because I’d never studied photography, the only assignments I could come up with were adapted from my early theater days, exercises that took the class directly to that moment of awareness and seeing, but instead of making characters we made pictures. And then we talked about photography.

So when I realized I had become too much the photographer, I knew enough to take some of my own medicine. I began to focus on just seeing things, but without the camera. I returned to writing, poetry and fiction, and my writing got better—and so did my photography.

This approach of using other disciplines to provoke seeing worked so well that I incorporated it into subsequent classes at the New School, ICP and the Maine and Santa Fe workshops. I brought in a poet, a Tai Chi teacher, a musician, a choreographer and, very notably, an actor. The participants set photography aside and practiced awareness. Then they made photographs.

One of my guests was the actor and director Alan Arkin, who led us in a morning of improvisations. That morning blew me open. The work we did was concrete and immediate, and it led right up to that timeless, dimensionless moment of creation where the photographer disappears so the artist can work.

People say that art is “about ideas,” but making it is not. Ideas may manifest and clarify afterward, but making it is rooted in the concreteness of doing. (“No ideas but in things,” said poet William Carlos Williams.)