Page 194
From Noren's
Charmed Particles
(1979).
est, since music doesn't get more sincere than that, and animals are great improvisers.
MacDonald:
How much preplanning do you do? How much editing do you do, once you've shot the material? And how often do you make imagery?
Noren:
There's preplanning only in the sense that I'm always thinking about images, thinking with images, always wanting to make images. Always ''working." By this time it's a natural function. I seldom look at anything without thinking of how it can be transformed into an "image." It's automatic, I'm not even conscious of doing it.
Preparation is mostly keeping the materials at hand and maintaining the correct frame of mind, which makes working possible. A delicate balance between energy and circumstance. This is much harder to do than it sounds. But, of course, the basic, vital thing is good light where everything is revealed in its miraculousness. That is my passion. I love it physically, as I would a beautiful animal. October light is my favorite, and the raw spring light that always seems "new," somehow, but I take whatever I can get. I love it all, and I shoot whenever I can.
At its best, this is done in a special state of mind. It's not a trance state, and certainly not the taking of angelic dictation as [Rainer Maria] Rilke meant it. I think of it as a state of "health," where thought and feeling are one and the same. The response to light: the process of