Dear Glen,

I've never felt that an external decline, if there ever was one, given all the great examples of work certainly equal to my own and the all too often constant of reality, which provides the standardization of our view, had anything to do with creating work that best represented a personal truth as the amalgamation of things that meant anything.

I am constantly reminded of photographers like Tom Hido or Larry Sultan www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibit...ame.html , who capture best what I am currently passing through, and it is that very thing - what we are passing through - that appeals to us.

What is important is still being captured. I do not agree that there is a decline. Perhaps you are not getting to the good galleries, where you stand back and note the lessons coming down the pike. Visit Stephen Wirtz Gallery www.wirtzgallery.com/main.html . I have spoken to Mr. Wirtz and noted his deep intelligence. Anywhere in the Geary and Grant Galleries of San Francisco, like Fraenkel Gallery, which I admit has become too lofty for the likes of me. As a photographer, I feel uncomfortable there, where it is like the transaction of money is more important than the creators. It is a place of sterile perfection, and I am poor, a poet whose carcasses of a lifetime will keep these galleries fed as they shop at the garage sale of my afterlife.

Still, there is this need by you to keep your eyes open. Maybe you are the diminishing eye and out from your mouth is the projection of a stagnant self. The art is you reacting to something in life that reflects what you are thinking or awakens you to what you should be thinking.

I am just betting without looking that you are less the ambitions you are complaining about and yet in your complaining I sense the space you are in is like the martyr of some expectation you are about to realize if you can at once see that we complain about what WE see and not necessarily what is there.

The great Dr. Phil once articulated this. It is we who perceive, see his chapter "There Is No Reality; Only Perception" in his book *Life Strategies*.

How would one mindfully design a great photograph? May I say that the image on the splash page of www.nccenterphotoarts.com is asleep at the wheel of any metaphorical depth? Although, of course, at the outset as these words bleed from my lips, I am scolded for in my criticism I see that there are indeed words, not necessarily kind words that have been provoked.

Art is simply that simple. Catharsis, the provocation of thought, intense debate, whether pro or con, is the stuff of great images. But, this is not to say that the arguments I might make about this particular example of your vision is not to say that I might not languish in mud in the process of describing my despise.

But, of course my condemnation of your vision establishes that I am perhaps of the same philosophy in our complaints about a "decline in photography." Too often I see technical skills presiding over a point of view that uses skill as something always first before metaphor, and I cannot describe what that metaphor is in this context for I have no examples or reference points, except perhaps Henri Cartier-Breson comes to mind. But, I see your kind of work in some of the best photography magazines, where they inherently talk about Ansel Adam's three pinnacles: The Negative, The Camera, and The Print. But, "With a simple Box Brownie camera," Cartier-Breson extracted magic from real life, which is always there, and like your complaints they fail only to see or work at looking for what is your responsibility to find.

But, again, in my defeat, I project on to you not so much the decline of photography as the exhaustion of what is rewarded in photography or somehow out of my reach. It is a lonely and impoverished way of life for those wandering around. And yes, I still have to say that of the images on the site, they are all the flat, indentured servants of an uninspired eye.