I should stop buying books on photography. They are depressing; how good they can be. Saul Leiter has been the most recent long-deceased photographer to vex me. His images are really something. They seem like very lucky accidents, except that he is able to produce them at will. I'm still stuck at the interesting accident phase, or so I hope to be. Harnessing accidents will require more time and patience.
In some ways it is like writing. It requires some tolerance and restraint, a recognition that you only have so much control over a given thing, over how the light will hit the film. Some attributes of the result occur only because you are there and you allow them to be. Then there are some that will never quite be yours. Trying too hard will make it yours, of course, but not in the manner that you may have hoped.
Then there are others that seem to only require composure. Still, I can feel them struggling to settle, to be something else. The below image is one I found that seems to evoke Sergio Larraine, though I would not have known that when I took the image. At the time I was openly struggling with the enigma of what is evident.
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