“The Organic Principle of Inspiration”

Letting one’s self go is but a half-principle…. The other half consists in getting one’s self together again.

Gerald Stanley Lee wrote this in The Lost Art of Reading, 1902. (It’s available at Project Gutenberg.) He was talking about reading, about how as a reader you should let yourself go with the book where it leads.

Today I opened to this paragraph at random and was immediately inspired to incorporate it into a photographic piece—but I won’t know until tomorrow whether or not anyone other than me knows that it’s there.

That’s almost the point for me: with my image and text project I want to explore various ways of bringing text into the camera, and once I have a method which works (not too much success yet, but it’s early days), I will then do the “getting together” and make the cogent work. That’s the plan, anyway.