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In My First Class At The University Of Kentucky, My American Literature Professor Came In, And The First Sentence Out Of His Mouth Was "the Central Theme Of American Literature Is An Attempt To Reconcile What We've Done To The New World." Wrote That Down In My Notebook, And Thought, "what Is He Talking About?" But That's What I Think About Now. The New World And What We've Done To It.

-Sam Abell

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In My First Class

Sam Abell

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In My First Class At The University Of Kentucky, My American Literature Professor Came In, And The First Sentence Out Of His Mouth Was "the Central Theme Of American Literature Is An Attempt To Reconcile What We've Done To The New World." Wrote That Down In My Notebook, And Thought, "what Is He Talking About?" But That's What I Think About Now. The New World And What We've Done To It.

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I Started Teaching In '76 And I'd Been A Photographer At The Geographic For Six Years. But Prior To Being At The Geographic I Was A Teacher. Plus My Parents Were Teachers And My Brother And My Grandparents. So It Was The Culture Of Our Family To Think About Teaching, To Talk About Teaching, To Talk About Teachers.

My Father Taught Me Photography. It Was His Hobby, And We Had A Small Darkroom In The Fruit Cellar Of Our Basement. It Was The Kind Of Makeshift Darkroom That Was Only Dark At Night.

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I Now Want To Be A Photographer Of My Time, And Our Common Culture.

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Compelling Reason

Mountain Ranges

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[ My Time And Our Common Culture] It's What I'm Photographing, And I'm Very Involved With That.

Increasingly, It's People Not Interested In National Geographic.

National Geographic

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...just Like Some People's Instinct To Photograph Is Triggered By Vacation... Assignments Might Be That To Me And That's Why I've Built My Life Around Assignments. That Was The Way To Live The Photographic Life.

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I Wanted Life To Be Episodic. I Wanted To Be A Magazine Photographer And I Was Willing To Do What It Took To Become That.

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Above All, It's Hard Learning To Live With Vivid Mental Images Of Scenes I Cared For And Failed To Photograph. It Is The Edgy Existence Within Me Of These Unmade Images That Is The Only Assurance That The Best Photographs Are Yet To Be Made.

Life Rarely Presents Fully Finished Photographs. An Image Evolves, Often From A Single Strand Of Visual Interest - A Distant Horizon, A Moment Of Light, A Held Expression.

My First Priority When Taking Pictures Is To Achieve Clarity. A Good Documentary Photograph Transmits The Information Of The Situation With The Utmost Fidelity; Achieving It Means Understanding The Nuances Of Lighting And Composition, And Also Remembering To Keep The Lenses Clean And The Cameras Steady.

As I Have Practiced It, Photography Produces Pleasure By Simplicity. I See Something Special And Show It To The Camera. A Picture Is Produced. The Moment Is Held Until Someone Sees It. Then It Is Theirs.

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My Parents, Grandmother And Brother Were Teachers. My Mother Taught Latin And French And Was The School Librarian. My Father Taught Geography And A Popular Class Called Family Living, The Precursor To Sociology, Which He Eventually Taught. My Grandmother Was A Beloved One-room School Teacher At Knob School, Near Sonora In Larue County, Ky.

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Exotic Novelty. My Statement To [people] Is Always, Well, Set This Picture In Your Home Town, Is It Still An Interesting Picture? Or Is It Just Exotic? Would I Care About This Same Picture Minus Its Exoticism?

First Of All, I Appropriate Photographs.in Presenting The Richard Prince Photograph I Tried To Be As Neutral As I Could Be. I Put Down The Fact Of It. I Wanted It To Be The Same Thing He Wanted It To Be, An Open Ended Invitation To Think About Authorship, And Who Owns A Created Work. So I Pair It With My Appropriated Picture.

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Editorial Photography Has To Be Energetic And Visually Competitive.

I Can't Speak For Other Photographers, But The Photographers Who Went Forward Strongly When The So-called "official" Part Of Their Career Ended, To Me, Were Those Who Had Taught. Teaching Enriches And Enlivens One's Work.

I'm Very Involved In Photographing America Now, So I Don't Think Of Faraway Places, As I Did When I Was Young.

This Might Seem Off The Track, But An Interesting Thing To Me That Others Could Talk About Better Than I, But One Of The Growth Areas In Photographic Education Has Been The So-called Slow Photography.

I Was A Consultant For Kodak Back In The Late 80's. There Were Engineers There Who Told Me That In The Future, Most Photographs Would Be Taken On Telephones. They Weren't Able To Do Anything With That. They Were Engineers, Not Management.

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