And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well.
And now, I feel at 85, I really feel that I'm just ready to start.
At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.
But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.
But I was very disappointed that I didn't get a chance to go overseas with that group, might not have gotten back but I wanted very much to go because there's not much of a record of the exploits of the first Negro fighter group.
I bought my first camera in a pawn shop there. It was a Voigtlander Brilliant and cost $12.50. With such a brand name, I could not resist.
I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it.
I had a tremendous interest and I just kept plugging away and knocking at doors, you know, seeking out encouragement where I could get it.
I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil - along with the evil of racism - with a camera.
I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.
I think maybe the rural influence in my life helped me in a sense, of knowing how to get close to people and talk to them and get my work done.
I was so excited over getting the Rosenwald and so excited about going to Washington to work for this famous group that I don't, I can't, honestly say that I had any preconceived ideas about what it was going to be like.
I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn't normally do for a young photographer just starting out.
I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.
I've been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing.
It's like people expect me to criticize my mother who died when I was fifteen because all I knew from her was perfection, you know?
Many times I wondered whether my achievement was worth the loneliness I experienced, but now I realize the price was small.
People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930's and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other.
So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.
That was my first day in Washington, D.C., in 1942. I had experienced a kind of bigotry and discrimination here that I never expected to experience.
The man at Kodak told me the shots were very good and if I kept it up, they would give me an exhibition. Later, Kodak gave me my first exhibition.
The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.
The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.
There's another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone else will take it further on, you know.
Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.
Well, I was born in Kansas, raised in Minnesota and spent a good part of my early life, up until I was about fifteen or sixteen, in Kansas.
You can show - with a camera you can show things that you like about the universe, things that you hate about the universe.
You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery.
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