May 20 1935

Mr Alfred Steiglitz
Am American Place
New York City

Dear Mr. Steiglitz:

I have long wanted to write you. I have continually hesitated and deferred doing so, however, for a number of reasons. One of them was this: I was afraid you were liable to be interested only in those who have done a considerable body of work. And I have not, - even now, (not in photography at least,) and so, still feel this hindrance to some extent. Yet, Because I now think I comprehend, even at this distance, somewhat better the meaning of what you are and what you have achieved, -I have come to conceive it necessary that you see the work I am enclosing, -slight in amount though it is, and only fractional of what I hope to accomplish. Even though you should not like the work, -I will still believe that I have done what was inevitable.

I will speak of myself at only enough length to give
you some inkling of the psychological background from which the
pictures sprang. I am 29,-born in Lake Charles La of French-Irish
parents. Came to New Orleans at 7. In 1938 my father died,-have
been working ever since in the business world,-mostly in banks.
Am now employed as a clerk by a large corporation. I have always,
and instinctively at first, I think, rebelled against the values
and rituals of the business plane. I wanted to take chemistry or

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medicine but, instead, had to go to work. I learned to love reading very early and for a long time spent all my spare funds on books. Have gradually, -driven by the lash of experience, -arrived at a hatred

of, and a fear of, the many things specialization and routinising are doing to the modern world. I have since perceived too, -discarding all my early theories of beauty as a thing-apart and the artist as a dweller-above-life, -how our unbalanced social system, together with the physiological and psychological effects of machinery on both owners and workers, -have distorted the function of art, -as all other vital relationships have been distorted, -shoving nearly all artists, save the very greatest workers, away from life, making them take, in sheer self-defense, a much too egotistic and personal attitude towards their work.

As much as I see and know these things I have yet, -for a number of reasons too complex and with too much bearing upon others beside myself, to go into now, - been unable to free myself from the trap of commercialism in which I am caught. All my work has been done in the brief respites, and with the residuum of vitality, left me by the nerve wracking exactions of the corporation for which I work. And I know that if I do not free myself within in next 5 years or so, it will be extremely unlikely that I will be able to do so at all. And I am well aware of the fate that awaits those office creatures whose talents or energies are no longer wanted by our economic system.

In order to bring into complete focus in my own mind what was happening to me, in order to lift myself from a purely individual sense of maturity, -since I knew that being only a single unit among many others in a like predicament, a complete realization of my own position would have true social value, -I began a novel.

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Its central figure is a clerk, who is acted upon by all the things
and situations peculiar to only our own era. But the man is more
than a case study, he is also a symbol, a symbol summing up the
modern
total plight of man in the modern world; and the novel, when finished
will indicate, if possible, a way out of this plight. With the ideas I
have developed, in this only partially finished work, in regard to
the city considered as a new, and vast, kind of emergent organism,
to the life of buildings, to some little recognized relationships
between men and metal, I cannot now deal, since I am sure
I would take entirely too much of your time.

At any rate, as I grew more and more to see the numberless
ways in which modern men evidenced imbalance because of their lack
gradually accelerating tendency to development in only one direction
and of only certain faculties and traits, I began to value increasingly
rounded harmonious evolving and furthered organization
of the series of systems in the body-mind autonomy. I saw that
keenness and skill of eye and hand and when possible, new senses
too, were necessary to heighten the effectiveness of the narrowly
"mental" functions. Knowledge of physiological as well as narrowly
"aesthetic" problems alike were needed. In this was the way of
escape, a difficult one it was true, from the muscular degeneration,
the sensory stultification brought about by the misuse of
modern
machinery and by business mores, which are psychological extensions
of machinal action.

It was then I took up photography in an effort to balance,
if possible, through its training in perceiving non-verbalized
relationships, the specialized tendency to verbalization that came
from my writing.

The first, fragmentary results of that concern you now have
before you. I think you will be able to sense the degree to which

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I have been able to impart, to these prints, the emotional and idea-
that combined with the previously mentioned reason to
'tional incentives' have impelled me to this work, i.e. the bitter
refusal to accept the specialized mechanical existence of the office
creatures around me (and with whom I spend the major part of my
time), the desperate effort to keep all the avenues of my senses
open, to escape the vistas closing daily around me, to pierce the
gloss of the commonplace originating from the tired and stunted
senses
of modern men; to capture, in a new and more significant
synthesis, the magic and horror of our times, the new kinds of
organizations of metal and flesh that are embodied in our com-
temporary world. I have not been able, I am afraid, to entirely
incorporate these incentives in the prints finished so far. Such
perfect incorporation awaits the completion of the extensive pro-
gram I have outlined below, also, and more importantly, my own
further sensory evolving. I feel convinced that whole new worlds
lie about us, sheathed in what we call the "commonplaceness" of
reality, ready to appear once our eye systems have developed far
enough, once the visual and coordinating faculties have attained
an organization that will enable us to grasp new patterns, more
inclusive relationships, in the huge dark complex and but partly-
known web of reality. A deepening of
"reality" awaits us. Certainly, in particular individuals, - those most creatively active, those
most free of the stunting and disorganizing effects of the Business
Machine (for instance, some children) this process of sensory evolving (speaking in terms of the comparison to the past history of the
race) is happening at a fairly rapid rate. Many of the arguments
between friends and enemies of modern art resolve themselves simply into differences of degree of sensory organization, most of
the "aesthetic" critics do not seem to see that the individual
sensory organization depends largely on the total social-economic

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structure of the individuals in particular environment.

To return: the program I have set for myself will take the form of several contrasted series. Each print in each series I will endeavour to make a step to the next. The present prints represent a very small portion, necessarily broken, of the total concepts. I haven't, as yet, obtained even a third of the number of prints necessary to complete these several series. The series are as follows:

Series #1. The Past. This will deal with the ancient life of this city, the old buildings with their forms adapted to outmoded functional patterns, old statues crystallizing emotive-idea-tional clusters that were different in structure from those of the modern city. I will especially avoid the so-called Vieux Carre remnants where the old have been largely disfigured by commercialism, by the cunning devices of a false and calculated picturesqueness, and concentrate instead upon those widely scattered authentic out thrusts of the past, hidden in old grime and forgotten streets, unseen of tourists, and the "pictorial artists" who so invariably take and retake the same objects of the tourist itinerary in so monotonous a manner. In this series, most of the pictures of old houses, -and in this city there are hidden houses whose forms could not be duplicated, I think, in any other city of the country, -are still to be taken.

Series #2. The Present. This will consist largely of industrial and architectural subjects. I will try to convey the creeping paralysis of the industrial conditioning of human minds, and, as well, the austere beauty of contemporary metal and stone.

Series #3 Mostly plant forms.

Series #4. In this series I will try to overthrow the very common concept that the camera is merely an instrument of representation.

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tation. I will try to deal with directly philosophic ideas in
means photography, -by using of composite printing, greater control of
light in exposure, printing and projection than has yet been
achieved, as well as by other means, -and without resorting to
pseudo-artistic soft focus effects or false symbolism. Of this
series only 3 prints have been completed so far, -less than in any
other.

I give below the titles of the ینک prints, also a few comments
on each.

Series #1. Print #71 (Cf. numbers placed on back of prints.)
"The Shadows of Another Time." (Detail of steps and escarpment
on an elevated tomb in St.Roch Cemetary, -one of the most untouched
and strangest cemetaries here.)

Print #26. "The Inrooted Cross." (Stone crucifix in St. Louis Cemetary #1, -among the oldest remaining burial grounds, I understand, in the country. Here the vague basal head symbolizes the child mind of humanity that conceived of the cross as a magic symbol to ward off the unknown. )

Print #34. "Naive Symbol." (Stone angel on a tomb in St. Louis Cemetary #1. The upper portion of the print is the result of a second exposure, -which I further accentuated by giving it a longer exposure/when printing, -using a black triangular shaped mask to accomplish this. The upper portion suggests the dream of the angel.

Print #91. "The Chains of the Past." (A huge tomb at S+.Louis Cemetary #1 in which a large number of men are buried, has gigantic iron post/and chains about it, with iron flames topping the posts. The chains suggest the retention of the past here.)

Print #65. "Winter." (One of four statues representing the seasons.
They are hidden behind shrubbery in Jackson Swuare, -and have never
been taken, so far as I know, by the hordes of picture seekers who

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come here and follow a standardized pictorial routine, seeing only
what others before them have seen.‡

Print #93. "Light on Three Planes of Stone." ( Tomb in St. Louis Cemetary #1.)

Print # 94. "The Palm and the Cross." (St Louis Cemetary #1.)

Print #226. "Rooted in Earth." ( A queer statue of a reddish stone which I discovered, its lower portion buried in the earth, in a neglected corner of Audubon Park.)

Print #194. "The Cobwebbed Lion." (Audubon Park. Not very large, but taken so as to appear overtowering. Note cobwebs in mouth.)

Print # X1. "The Crest of the Wave." (Crucifix and tombs, St.Roch Cemetary. -Catholic Christianity at its height.

Print #X2. "The Retreating Wave." (St.Roch again. -The decline of Catholicism with the disruption of the old city. )

Print #281. "Past and Present." (St.Roch. The powerful wedge of the Present , -in the shape of the intruding telephone pole,-splits the organization of the Past.

Print #27. "The Horn of Silence." (Detail of tomb in St.Louis #1.
This print will conclude, symbolically as well as numerically,
Series #1.

All of the above, in one way or another, seem to me to suggest
ways of seeing,
or embody organizations of emotional response, or ways of feeling
towards stone, or special ways of using symbols, that were, I be-
lieve, more integral to the life of the old city than they are to
the new.

Series #2. Print #261. "Big Business:The Iron Face." (All the harshness, the rigidity, the blood-remoteness that are components of the psychological background of Big Business are concretely symbolized in this object. It is more than a symbol, it is an organic

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indicator, -I might say,- because of the fact it evolved directly
from actual usage. It is, in usage, a railway terminal bumper. Its
very structure deviously but definitely <u>evidences</u> the psychic
states animating the big business procedures that, in turn, made
its structure possible and necessary. )

Print #47. "Light on Three Planes of Stone." (New Criminal Courts
Bldg. New Orleans. Contrast with Print #93.)

Print #156. "The March of the Rivets."

Print #88. "The Monster."

Series #3.

Print #.197. "The Veined Air." (Circulatory system of twigs and branches of crepe myrtles.)

Print #276. "Dark Thrust."

Print #252. "Yucca."

Print #245. "Resurgence." (Lily stalks in a pool in Audubon Park.)

Print #X3. "Cactus."

Print #237. "The Lily Antennae." (Lily stalks in a pool. They had cut down during winter, -two new vigorous shoots are emerging with spring.)

Print #287. "Leaf and Glass Composition" (This is the first of a number of interior studies.)

Series #4.

Print #E 1. "Metal Dominant." (The metal world, -as indicated by the framework of steel, -emerges from a receding background of the animal and plant worlds, -as suggested by dim head and leaves.)

Miscellaneous Prints.

Print #241. "Portrait of the Photographer." (Taken by Lenox An-
tony, a friend with whom I have taken a number of my early pictures.)

Print # 239. "Reversal." (Immense line of tall palms, tiny man looming huge.)

Print # 244. "Light on Metal."

Print # 257. "Light on Wood."

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I am conscious that a good many of the prints, from a purely
technical viewpoint, leave a great deal to be desired. My background
of experience in printing developing and projection is not very ex-
tensive; I am entirely self-taught. My darkroom is a converted
store room in an old shed, -all equipment, including plumbing, elec-
tric wiring, enlarging machine, printing box, sink, shelves etc.
being constructed or installed by myself on week ends or at nights.
apparatus
My only factory-made equipment is my camera, its plateholders, five
glass trays, a print roller, a thermometer and two chromium drying
plates. My camera is a Carl Zeiss Nixe 2; though I have used a
Kodak 3A and a Goerz camera for short periods. At present I am
using Kodak Portrait Par Speed cut film, x Verichrome Roll film,
and the Kodak formulae for printing and developing. For enlarging
I use Vitava Opal paper and get some enlargements of 40 seconds or
less with my home-made machine on 8x10 paper. I have been doing
my own developing and printing since February of this year. All
prints sent herewith are the work of the ensuing period with the
exception of Prints #194 #226 and # 197 which were done at the
Kodak Co before my dark room was finished. Since I have had to make
pratically all my apparatus, besides going aut and getting the
pictures etc. in the short periods left over from my office du-
ties, you can understand that I have been working under great
time pressure...

Of course, many, if not all, of the ideas I have mentioned
in this letter, you are yourself thoroughly familiar with. You
will forgive, I hope, my repetition of them to you. Probably my
tendency towards proclamation arises simply from the enthusiasm
due to my own recent arrival at these viewpoints and, too, from
the strange sort of loneliness that afflicts some men in a period

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of cultural devitalization. In my own particular environment there
are very few people with whom the interplay of such ideas is at all
possible, without the ghastly feeling that one is simply dropping
words into a peculiar sort of vacuum, where there is not possibili-
ty of them taking root, I am doing my best to form a group, -a
real group here, -a group that will deal with both the scientific
and aesthetic approaches to contemporary problems. I am not meeting
with great success however. I enclose two statements which I wrote
for this projected group, -in the hope it will be of some interest
to you. Please return the statements.

The ultimate aim of all this projected work, of these past
endeavours, is, I know, to give order to my life. I must not be
carried away by the mad mechanical pandemonium sweeping our age.
in turn,
And it is this final objective that makes it necessitous that I
should seek, in submitting these prints for your inspection, -the
vision of a man whose eyes have been trained to see,-and whom, it
may be, will detect any lapse in keenness of sight or concept
that may be hidden from myself. I hope, in any event, that the
prints will be able to redeem, to some extent at least, my appro-
priation of your time.

I enclose stamped self -addressed envelope for return of
prints and the two statements.

A STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES
(for a formative group.)

1. The harmonious development of all the functions of the human mind.

This should mean, and **dous** mean, inevitably, that we must commit ourselves to a definite program of physical activity, -since the so-called "mental" functions are tied in with, and extended by, dynamic body-patterns. We must not, however, restrict the meaning of "physical activity" to simple muscular expressions; but must include the more complex kinds of muscular expression also. It follows, therefore, that the harmonious development of the functions of the human mind implies necessarily the complex muscular expressions that are involved in all processes whereby the keenness, the competence, of eye and ear and hand are increased. Intensified sharpness, and increased organization of all sensory perceptions, as well as simple physical exercise, is inevitably then, a part of this first objective.

As a single instance of how the two phases (i.e. "mental" and "physical") of the total body-mind organization are bound together in living action it might be pointed out that the capacity for "seeing" patterns in photographic composition depends on certain muscular coordinations. This capacity, in brief, develops only from **using** the eyes, from the organization of the muscular responses, -not merely by reading books on the subject.

It will be seen that this first objective discards the passive absorption of ideas from the printed page, and the kind of incompleteness that thereby arises, -in favor of acquiring knowledge by muscular patterns, and for the living knowledge that comes from the translation and re-absorption of these ideas in dynamic activity. It is thus in complete accord with the concept of "functional usage."

## -2- A STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES.

2. The development, and investigation, further, of some of the latent capacities of the body-mind organization, the potential powers and faculties that are being slowly atrophied in us by our civilization.

This, of course, implicates considerable experimentation.

3. The free interchange of ideas.

Truly creative ideas are the psychic sprouts of the series of physiological and psychological changes that make up, in the individual, what is briefly called "evolution", and which herald, in turn, larger social changes. It is essential, therefore, that ideas have a natural and unhampered flowering. It is our duty to water the soil by experimentation and observation, and to provide room for the growths.

4. The furtherance of the concept that the so-called "scientific" and "aesthetic" methods can be interwoven: to use "facts" as enrichment of aesthetic experience; to buttress aesthetic experience with a more extensive coordination of "facts" than has yet been attempted. Further, to <u>live</u> the knowledge that aesthetic experience is at least as necessary to full human existence as food or money; that it is just as "utile", - therefore to do away with the limited use of the word "utility" in the sense of that which contributes only to belly or purse.

Aesthetic experience is not something absolutely distinct from all other human experience; it has its roots in common human activity. It is merely the unbalancing pressure of the economic system that has driven many artists to conceive of art and art experience as something entirely detached from ordinary living; independent something of time and place. The value of living aesthetic experience is that it brings about more complete or-

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A STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES.

## KANIZSA

ganization of the human faculties, and a more complete unfolding
of human potentialities, than would otherwise be reached. It, in
brief, expands the range of our responses while reducing them to
order.

5. Lastly, the frankly practical avowal that our project must be-
come progressively self-sustaining; with the future objective
that we will be able not only to obtain better conditions and
quarters than we now possess for the organization we are now
attempting, but that, ultimately, we will be able to free
ourselves from the traps of commerce in which most of us are
caught.

A STATEMENT OF POSSIBLE BENEFITS.

It will be realized that the attainment of the aforemen tioned
objectives will necessarily take some time; probably a period
of years. However, if we do attain them, even though only in
things,
part, it will mean, among other things this:

1. That we will be able to combat the impoverishment and the disastrous confusion that is growing about us and within us. The word "impoverishment" is not used in any metaphorical sense. Nor in an economic sense,-though economic impoverishment is undoubtedly growing more widespread and is undoubtedly one of the contributing agencies to the kind of impoverishment to which reference is being made. By impoverishment is meant here that the extreme specialization forced upon modern men by our economic and social system is definitely dangerous in a physiological and psychological sense.

Here is a concrete example: it can be shown that the special-
ized life that the modern office-worker leads shuts off certain
areas of the mind entirely, atrophies certain functions, deprives
him not only of the time, but the capacity, for the complete de-
velopment of his senses, for the balanced functioning of the
series of physiological systems incorporated in his flesh. It
increases dangerously the patterning of men upon machinery, -for
modern corporations are undoubtedly psychic mechanisms, -and the
terrific drive of the profit motive, which our economic system
exalts, - transforms men insiduously, by a series of greed reflexes
as well as by other kinds of habit formation and stultification,
into strange and frightful semi-men. Their responses become as
limited as mechanical action; even their thoughts become psycho-
logical parallels of the motions of mechanism.

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A STATEMENT OF POSSIBLE BENEFITS.

2. We will be able to close some of the "splits" in character that occur in us only in lesser degree, perhaps, than in those around us.

We will be able to see more clearly some of the curious ways in which our concepts of love and truth and morality do not fit together, how they produce discordant actions, how confusion is stunting us, how the relationship between our values and our daily actions has been subtly twisted by the economically and socially imbalanced society in which we live. We will learn how to take into account these rifts in character( which are different in each one of us) and how to prevent the curious kind of "drift" which they are producing.

3. Having healed some of these divisionings and fissures in ourselves, having overcome some of this confusion, we may hope to become happier individuals, and therefore, in a true social sense, more valuable to society. For the only hope of our civilization development is the development of enough individuals who really know themselves, and who will therefore know how to use, and to misuse, power, - the power that science and the machines have placed in our hands, the power that may yet build a better society if wisely used.