On Solitude, Working Alone

I have worked almost entirely alone for fifty years — first by accident, then by preference, eventually by what I would now call method. The first ten of those years I thought working alone was a deficiency. The next thirty I came to understand as the principal reason any of the photographs are any good.

Photography in company is conversation interrupted by photography. Photography alone is photography interrupted, occasionally, by attention to the body's quiet needs. The composition gets ten times the time. The light gets all of it.

I have known very few good landscape photographers who worked well with companions. I have known several mediocre ones who did. It is, in the end, a temperamental sorting.