I run to form. It pulls me strongly. When I don’t seem to be able to deal with people, I can go out and make beautiful abstract photographs. Some have trouble making such things, but they’re simple for me. I take them seriously because I have been able to penetrate mere likeness. I always think about the frame in the camera. There’s a book called Change by Weakland and Fisch, two California psychologists, that talks about changing the frame in which a problem is stated. The object of one of their examples is to connect a series of dots with only four lines; everyone stays within the pattern formed by the dots. The answer to the problem is to go out of the dots and come back in with a diagonal line. That is a kind of clue as to what I am trying to do. Recently, I looked at a group of pictures I had done, all on one contact sheet. I thought, OK, each picture is not very strong, but as a group they really build up to an idea. I thought, why not just frame them together? I had never done it before, it had always seemed sort of gimmicky. But I think it works that way somehow. I felt happy about changing the problem by actually changing the frame in which I was approaching these things. I'm able to photograph in a more relaxed way—and with more directness—knowing I don’t have to get it in one picture but can do it in four or five. I like going at it in that way. It may not work. But I feel released by that idea—just as when I put the vignette around the subject originally. Somehow it makes happen what didn’t without it. It was an entirely different approach to an old problem. It is the impetus by which one begins to work and solve the problem that is intrinsic, crucial. Not the problem of how to frame it, but of how to get at whatever is driving you. How do I do it? How do I approach it? What goads me for the answer? That’s what keeps me going. I pile up a lot of work; nothing may seem to be there. All of a sudden I pull a picture from this pile, another from that pile and yet another. Maybe later I can say that's the idea. That is the idea.
Charles H. Traub, Beach