You don't have to be crazy to be a good photographer- but perhaps it helps?? I'm serious. The trick seems to be in keeping those obsessions in check..
Another great anecdote from my fave book of the week:
''Having been sacked from Life magazine in 1955, [W. Eugene] Smith accepted a commission to do a small-scale project on the city of Pittsburgh. Given that the assignment was only supposed to last three weeks, his sponsor in the city was surprised to see him unloading some 20 items of luggage from his station wagon. Smith's refusal to abide by deadlines had strained the patience of all his employers but it was in Pittsburgh that his insistence on taking as long as the job required reached megalomaniacal proportions.
For the first month he barely clicked the shutter, preferring, as he always did, to get to know his subject. He spent a year making over ten thousand exposures of every facet of the city. And this was just the beginning. Conceiving the Pittsburgh project as the photographic equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses, Smith then tried and kept failing to print and edit the mass of material into an order that would do justice the 'tremendous unity of his convictions'.
Smith's biographer, Jim Hughes, paints an unforgettable picture of the photographer driving himself to the brink of madness as he grappled with his gargantuan undertaking. Wired on amphetamines, banging out letters full of delirious teeth-grinding intent, Smith would work for three or four days straight and then collapse. Free at last to realize his ambitions of total artistic control, he began to suffer a kind of dementia of seeing. Then In 1957 after separating from his family, Smith moved into a loft on 821 Sixth Avenue.
As if recoiling from a project in which he had tried to see everything from every point of view, Smith now took pictures from the reassuringly limited vantage point of his window. Cars going by, people getting in and out of them, snow falling''
BUT, being Smith... ''unable to do anything without doing it obsessively, he soon had six cameras trained on the street. When the floor below him became vacant, he took over that window too.''
"A friend recalled turning up at the loft to find Smith with six cameras loaded, leaning out of the window. He had already been sitting at the window for twenty hours straight and remained there for another six or seven while his friend passed him cameras.''
"Hughes goes on to explain. 'Because of the window's proximity to his hew darkroom and workspace, Gene was able to fairly quickly able to produce work prints, pinning them up to create a constantly changing panoply on 4x8 panels that slowly but surely began to divide the loft into a maze of interior streets and alleys.'
The photographer didn't want to go out into the streets; instead, by dint of obsessive Borgessian twists, the streets moved into his home.''
The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer.
