February 26, 1962
531 E. 81 Street
New York City
James Zanutto
Features Ed.
Pop Photo
One Park Ave., New York
Dear Mr Zanutto,
After reading Hattersley’s “Good & Bad Pictures” in your most recent issue, I mentioned what I thought was an article possibility to Bob Bone and he suggested I see what you thought of it.
It’s title might be something like “The Case for the Chronic Snapshooter.” This derives from Hattersley’s statement that snapshooting is not, by definition, a low and ignorant art. He cites Weegee and Cartier-Bresson as examples.
I enjoyed seeing this in print. Because after being in New York for a while, reading Pop Photo and mingling here and there with photographers, I was beginning to feel that no man should ever punch a shutter release without many years of instruction and at least $500 worth of the finest equipment. As a free-lance writer, I’ve been taking pictures for several years, often just for the hell of it, and often to illustrate my articles. I’ve had a good time at it, and sold enough pictures to cover my lab expenses and the initial cost of my equipment several times over. My “equipment” consists of Yashica-Mat, a cheap light meter, and a yellow filter.
When I got to New York, however, I was given to understand that I might just as well be shooting with a Brownie Hawkeye. My only salvation lay in a Hasselblad, a Nikon and quick enrollment in a photographers’ school. I pondered this for a while and soon found myself running in circles, going from one camera store to the next, promising them all that I’d come back the next day and buy a complete outfit. Meanwhile, I zipped my camera into a suitcase and stopped taking pictures altogether. They were bound to be terrible, and besides that, I was embarrassed to be seen on the street with my ratty equipment.
Then I read Hattersley’s piece. After that i got out some of my prints and decided that not all of them were worthless. As a matter of fact there were some that gave me great pleasure. And I had sold a good many, I’d enjoyed taking them, and some had even given other people pleasure.
That’s my idea in a nutshell. When photography gets so technical as to intimidate people, the element of simple enjoyment is bound to suffer. Any man who can see what he wants to get on film will usually find some way to get it; and a man who thinks his equipment is going to see for him is not going to get much of anything.
The moral here is that anyone who wants to take pictures can afford adequate equipment and can, with very little effort, learn how to use it. Then, when the pictures he gets start resembling the ones he saw in his mind’s eyes, he can start thinking in terms of those added improvements that he may or may not need.
For instance: there are damn few things you can’t shoot at a 500th of a second, so why get an inferiority complex if your camera doesn’t go up to 1000th? Anybody who can afford that extra nickel for Tri-X can shoot indoors at night with any camera that has a 3.5 lens and shutter speed down to to 50 or 25. Why give up because you can’t afford a camera with a 1.8 or 1.4 lens? First push 3.5 to it’s absolute limit, and if it still bugs you, you’ll find some way to buy that other camera. If not, you don’t need it anyway.
I’m enclosing some prints to demonstrate my thesis. There is something technically wrong with every one of them, but I have sold enough of these and others to make my snapshooting habit pay it’s own way. Some of these were taken at a time when I didn’t even know that some films were faster than others. Then, when I discovered Tri-X, I moved indoors and, with little tricks like tilting lampshades, etc., I have never found a situation that caused me to slink off in shame because I couldn’t shoot a 1000th.
It may be that my thesis will rub some of your high-price advertisers the wrong way, but I doubt it. After all, the best way to appreciate fine equipment is to shoot with some that isn’t so fine, and then move up. But no man will learn an inferiority complex quicker than he who starts out with a Leica and constantly gets poorer stuff than his buddy with an Olympus Pen. And the man who starts out with an inexpensive but adequate camera will soon learn its limitations, and he’ll appreciate his Leica when he gets it.
That’s about it. This letter is a rough sketch of the proposed article, so you should have a good idea what I’m driving at. If it doesn’t interest you, give the prints to Bone instead of mailing them back to me. My mailman has a bad habit of jamming photos into my mailbox and I’d rather not have that happen to these.
Cordially,
Hunter S. Thompson