NH: A gathering of people to work together and to explore together, to paint or make photographs or to write together, I think is a very valid thing to do. In the Edo period in Japan, when they would finish a scroll, all the artists would get together and they would have wine and each person would write something at the end of the scroll, some calligraphy or a little poem. They would respond to this creative thing, creatively-and it was a sharing. But you can't have a workshop that way. You can't get people together in our society and say, "well, let's share.” In our society you have to find a new way to find people. There's the job of attracting people, and then there's the pursuit of keeping people there, which can go wrong. And before you know it, someone is behaving like they're "the teacher." That's what wrong with most all of those workshop situations today. Minor White told me something very interesting. He said that one needs to become more and more of a student. The person who conducts the workshop needs to come at it trying to learn how to be a student even more so, more and more, deeper and deeper. That's how I approached my teaching. It was "I am pursuing this. Let's try it together." The students did like being around me. I would say, "Let's have a workshop, and it could be based on magic." What is magic? Or "Let's base it on Mount Analogue. Everyone learned to love that book. Let's really look at this book. And let's derive what we're doing out of that experiencing. And of course, I was learning. I'd do things where I'd just put myself out on a limb. I didn't want to teach—you know—this finger-pointing teaching. I learned to steer clear of that because of Minor White’s influence. Of course, I did a lot of teaching, but the right kind hopefully.
RW: Can you give me an example of putting yourself out on a limb?
NH: Well, I didn't really know what was going to come out of the question of magic. I mean all these various people coming—they're going to bring their own notions of magic. I had my own. I knew that mine could not be complete, so I was there to learn. It wasn't put your money down on the barrel head, and you'll get so much at the end, you know. Generally, when we charged for the workshops, what it did was cover the cost of the food, because we made our own meals and we listened to music and some times we'd end up having to build the table that we ate off of. We had a number of these workshops at our cottage. One year we read Rilke, The Eulogies. We would sit down to breakfast and there was a fellow who could read German and he would read a verse in German, and then I'd read it in English. At each meal we'd read something and then ask, "What could we photograph that might evoke something of this feeling, this quality? Can I find some image that would be some equivalent?" So here we are, back at Minor White and his "equivalencies." These weekends were all very wonderful. They have become a model for what I wish for. Four photographers came out of those work periods, one who teaches at Cornell University, one who was the director of an art school in Maui, Hawaii; another went to the Guggenheim where he is head of their photography department. The fourth one is a commercial photographer, very good at what he does. One of my students became a cabinet maker and wound up teaching at the Road Island School of Design. I feel a certain pride for all of them; they are all artists.
RW: I think you said that to be an artist, art has to come first. In your case, you have a loving wife and two loving children, but you said you also had this mistress. You'd come home and have dinner and right afterwards you'd go down into the basement and work late into the night.
NH: I did that. Maybe it was ego to begin with. But we need to distinguish between what is ego-driven and what is driven by the muse within—a big distinction there. So you begin turning your back on ego motivation because you've seen it so deeply. I'm not saying ego-motivated is a bad thing, because in those days it began with that. It must have been. It drove me to distraction. It was my mistress. But that can end in disaster or in a different kind of suffering, the suffering of just seeing yourself. In asking yourself what the hell are you trying to do? What do you really want? Do you really want to be a famous photographer? Is that what it's about? Or is it something else? In this way I found my way to the muse. So having the good fortune of not becoming famous, I had a different opportunity. I learned a lot of crafts over the years. At age fifty I learned how to build a house. I wanted to build a house and I knew if I was ever going to learn to build one, I had to do it now. And I built a cottage. I actually built with friends.
RW: You know Carl Jung said that every man should build himself a house.
NH: He did? I love Carl Jung. It's a wonderful experience. I'll never forget it. It took me years. It wasn't really quite finished when I sold it twenty years later. You know that's an interesting story. In the early 60's I had seen some reproductions of some of Edward Weston's 1936 nudes of his wife on the sand dunes. So I wrote to him and bought two of these prints. They cost me $25 a piece. In 1978 I sold the two of them for a total of about $10,000 and with that money, and a little more I'd earned from side jobs, I built my cottage. This money bought all the lumber and then some. It was a grand experience—something real.
RW: That's a great story.
NH: It just happened that way. Even Jean loved them. I got them because I loved them. And many years later, I sold the cottage for $72,000. It was on protected land along a river. That money helped me to get settled here in Corvallis. You mentioned Jung. Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. That's a wonderful book. We used to make a list of books that were worth reading and that one was on the list.
RW: Well, some books are really worth reading, as you say. And earlier you gave an example of kids not having a book to turn to. That's something else.
NH: Right, you're present with it. I remember once being on a quarry pond, ice skating, and the ice began moving up and down like this. I refer to that as a conscious moment. Really, it's a moment when I am. There are no words for it, actually. I remember once having an accident. I was about to go head on into another car on a snowy road. Everything slowed down. There was plenty of time. I was absolutely cool and collected. I steered the car right across the road in front of the other car to the other side of the road instead of trying to get back, in which case, I would have just slid into him. I was able to avoid getting killed. But, it's like my teacher said to me, "Nick, you don't want to wait until the car is upside down, to be awake." It's too late, then. One has missed one's entire life. Like quicksilver, it has vanished. Sometimes it takes another person to give you a prod. But then it's up to you to find out how to do it yourself. Hopefully there's this chance of being resuscitated. I really wish people would know that, would really see that they're not alive. I wish that I would see more often that I'm not alive! Because the difference between one and the other-you might as well be buried in the ground. Don't you think it's that strong sometimes? There is another thing. Talk about mentors. I asked myself, who was my first mentor. I remember this man, his name was Mr. McKim. He was a very old chap. When I was sick, I would have to stay home three or four days. He taught me how to play chess out on his back porch. And there was our landlord, an old codger who played flute, beautiful flute. Well, I was a rowdy kid running up and down the stairs, and he couldn't play his flute. He said, "Nicky I'll bet you can't sit still for two whole minutes." "I can!" [hits table with fist for emphasis] Just two minutes, and then I would get the two cents. He had a big leather couch and a great big clock that went tick, tock. And I sat on that couch quiet for two whole minutes. Didn't move or twitch a muscle. Talk about fortuitous things to happen for a second-grader. I had that experience of sitting there hearing that clock. It's still easy to recall that. One has mentors all the way through if you're lucky enough. That's luck. It's only luck that I had those moments of remembering, sitting on the couch. You remember those moments and those are conscious moments. There are moments when one really is awake. It's not that other thing that we call "life."
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Nicholas Hlobeczy died in 2007.
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