The In-Between.

I don't know if I've ever been meant to be famous for taking pictures. That's a strange thing for a photographer to admit. For years, I thought success had to look like something visible. The publication. The client. The exhibition.

The television appearance. The book. The audience. The numbers. Somebody knowing my name when I walked into a room. I've had pieces of that.

I've worked with companies I once thought would prove something. I've photographed people I never imagined I'd meet. I've taught thousands of students. I've had people clap when I walked into a room. I've had photographs published. I've been on television.

I've made money. I've lost money. I've built businesses. I've watched businesses disappear. I've had social posts get attention. I've had things I thought were fucking brilliant receive absolutely nothing.

And after all of it, I think I misunderstood what the work was doing. Maybe the photographs were never only about photographs. Maybe the songs aren't only songs. Maybe this book isn't really about a book. Maybe it's always been about transmission. Something happens to you.

You notice it. You feel it. You make something from it. Then somebody else encounters what you made. And something happens to them. That's the whole fucking miracle.

You don't control what happens next. Maybe they cry. Maybe they laugh. Maybe they think you're an asshole. Maybe they scroll past it. Maybe they don't understand it until ten years later.

Maybe they make something of their own. Maybe they call somebody. Maybe they finally leave something that has been killing them. Maybe they finally begin something they've been afraid to start. Maybe nothing happens at all. You don't get to decide.

Your job was the transmission. That's something my grandmother understood without ever calling it art. Grandma made photographs. Family pictures. Birthdays. Christmases.

Easters. Trips. People sitting around tables. Kids growing up. Ordinary shit. She wasn't trying to build a photography career.

She wasn't trying to develop a personal brand. She wasn't wondering whether the photograph would perform well on Instagram. She was making memories. That's what she called it. Making memories. I've told thousands of photography students about that.

Think about that for a second. My grandmother picked up a camera because she loved her family. She taught a little boy to care about photographs. That little boy grew up. He went to art school. Moved to New York.

Became a photographer. Started teaching. And then told thousands of other people:

Make memories.

Grandma died when I was eighteen. She never saw any of that. She never saw New York. She never saw me teaching photography. She never saw my books. She never saw the photographs I made in Italy.

She never saw Colombia. She never saw me working with companies whose names she probably would have recognized. She never saw students sitting in classrooms listening to me tell stories about her. She never knew how far something she gave me would travel. That's fucking unbelievable when you really think about it. A human being can leave the world and still be creating consequences.

Maybe that's legacy. Not a statue. Not fame. Not your fucking follower count. Consequences. You put something into another person, and they carry it somewhere you never get to see.

I learned that again years later in New York. I was teaching photography, and a man came from Thailand for private lessons. He wanted to learn film. Darkroom. Photography. So for a couple of days, that's what we did.

I showed him cameras. Exposure. Film. Development. Printing. All the technical shit.

Then he went home. Life continued. Students come and go when you teach. You don't always know what happens to them. Years later, an email arrived. It was him.

There were photographs attached. Pictures of him holding his little daughter. And he told me that he was making photographs of her because of what I'd taught him. Like my grandmother had made photographs of me. Fuck. That's the work.

Not whether I taught him the perfect relationship between shutter speed and aperture. Not whether he remembered every technical thing I said. Something traveled. Grandma to me. Me to him. Him to his daughter.

Maybe one day his daughter makes photographs of her children. I'll probably never know. Grandma certainly won't. That's transmission. And once you start looking at creativity that way, the definition gets a hell of a lot bigger. Creativity isn't painting.

It isn't photography. It isn't music. Those are forms. Creativity is the human ability to encounter reality and respond with something that did not exist before. That's fucking enormous. A photograph qualifies.

A song qualifies. A business qualifies. A recipe qualifies. A solution qualifies. A conversation can qualify. A way of teaching something.

A garden. A piece of furniture. A joke. A community. A fucking spreadsheet if it solves the right problem. Software.

A family tradition. A new way to tell someone you love them. A way out. That's creativity. You look at what exists and say:

What else is possible?

Then you make an attempt. That's why I believe creativity is much more important than art. Art is one beautiful manifestation of it. But creativity is agency. It is the ability to participate in your own life. That might be one of the most important things I've learned.

When everything happened with N, I felt powerless. The river. The hospital. The marriage. The business. The money.

The future. There were things happening that I could not fucking control. And my instinct had always been:

Fix it.

But some things cannot be fixed by you. Some people cannot be fixed by you. Some relationships cannot be fixed by you. Some events cannot be reversed. Some losses cannot be negotiated with. That kind of helplessness can destroy you if your entire sense of power depends on controlling the outcome.

Creativity gave me somewhere else to put my hands. I couldn't control what N did. I could pick up the guitar. I couldn't control the marriage. I could write the sentence. I couldn't make another human being become who I hoped she could become.

I could photograph the mountains. I could open the notebook. I could take whatever the fuck was happening inside me and give it a shape. That's agency. Not control. There's a difference.

Control says:

I can determine what happens.

Agency says:

I can decide what I do with what happens.

That distinction may have saved my fucking life more than once. Pain without somewhere to go can become poison. That's how I think about it. Get the poison out. I've said that phrase a lot. Sometimes I mean it literally as a creative process.

Something hurts. Something scares me. Something confuses me. Something excites me. Something makes me horny. Something makes me angry.

Something makes me feel alive. Put it somewhere. Song. Page. Photograph. Conversation.

Guitar. Canvas. Whatever. Give the feeling somewhere to go besides endlessly around your own fucking skull. That doesn't mean creativity replaces therapy. It doesn't mean a song cures depression.

It doesn't mean painting fixes trauma. It doesn't mean writing a poem makes the problem disappear. That's bullshit. After I wrote those three songs alone in the apartment in Colombia, my marriage was still fucked. I was still confused. I still hurt.

I still had problems the next morning. But I was a little different. Because for a few hours, the pain had somewhere to go. I could observe it. Shape it. Hear it outside myself.

The experience had become something. Even if nobody else ever heard it. That's why I don't believe an audience is necessary for creativity to matter. The act itself changes the creator. The little boy drawing the barn didn't need an audience. Nobody needed to applaud.

He disappeared into another world for an hour. That mattered. I think we underestimate that. We're living in a time where making something and publishing something have become almost synonymous. You make a photograph. Post it.

Write something. Post it. Play a song. Post it. Cook something. Photograph the fucking meal.

Post it. And then immediately: Who liked it? Who watched? How many views? Did it perform?

Maybe nobody needs to fucking see it. That's allowed. Make something nobody ever sees. Write something you never publish. Play guitar alone. Take a photograph and print one copy.

Draw badly. Sing terribly. Dance in the kitchen. Create something that has absolutely no economic value. No audience. No strategy.

No fucking call to action. See what happens to you. Because creativity existed before content. Human beings were making marks on cave walls before there was a marketing funnel attached to the fucking thing. We make because something inside us wants to become visible. And sometimes that's enough.

But then sometimes you do share it. And that's where the second miracle happens. Connection. I've photographed thousands of people. And the photographs I remember most aren't necessarily the technically best ones. I remember moments.

I remember people. I remember chemistry. I remember stories. Sometimes I don't even have the photographs anymore. C asked me to delete hers. So I did.

But I still remember that night. The Irish bar. The cigarettes. Her laugh. The red dress. Central Park.

The chess tables. Walking the West Side. The photographs are gone. But they're still in my fucking head.

Photographs in your fucking head.

I love that idea because it destroys one of the assumptions I've carried for most of my life. That the object is the important part. It isn't always. Sometimes the experience was the artwork. I met Anthony Bourdain once on Sixth Avenue. My phone was dead.

No photograph. For years, part of me wished I'd had one. Proof. Charlie met Bourdain. Look. Here we are.

But what would the photograph actually change? I remember him. I remember what he was wearing. I remember the sunglasses. The jacket. The jeans.

The conversation. I remember what meeting him meant to me because I'd watched him travel through the world with curiosity and seemingly very few fucks given about how people thought he should do it. The photograph wouldn't have made that more real. It would have given me evidence. The memory gave me meaning. That's different.

Maybe creativity isn't always about preserving the thing. Maybe it's about becoming somebody who notices the thing while it's happening. That's a much bigger gift. Photography taught me to look. Music taught me to listen. Writing taught me to examine.

Teaching taught me to explain. Business taught me to solve. Travel taught me to enter worlds I don't understand. Relationships taught me that another human being can never be completely understood. Failure taught me to reconsider. Pain taught me to make.

And all of those things are starting to look less like separate careers and more like different instruments in the same fucking orchestra. That's what took me decades to understand. I kept thinking I had to pick one. Photographer. Musician. Teacher.

Designer. Programmer. Entrepreneur. Writer. Which one are you? All of them.

None of them. They're verbs disguised as identities. I photograph. I play. I teach. I design.

I program. I build. I write. I make. The noun I probably care about least now is the label. The verb is where the life happens.

Create.

That's the operating system. Once I understood that, my life started making more sense. The weird path made more sense. Why I could become obsessed with a guitar one week and software the next. Why I could spend hours photographing somebody and then stay awake writing. Why I loved teaching.

Why I loved building businesses. Why I loved asking strangers questions. Why I could walk into nine pizza shops because somebody told me to get a fucking uniform. Why I could move across the country. Why I could move to another country. Why I could fuck things up spectacularly and still wake up asking:

Okay. What do we do now?

It's the same impulse. What is possible? Let's find out. That's also why I think creativity can save people. Not in the cheesy fucking sense. Not:

Everybody paint a picture and the world will be perfect.

No. Human beings will still hurt each other. People will still die. Relationships will still end. Money will still matter. Wars will happen.

People will get sick. Life will still hand you shit sandwiches. Creativity doesn't remove reality. It gives you another way to participate in it. That's the power. A person who believes they can create has options.

Maybe not unlimited options. I'm not selling magical-thinking bullshit. You cannot manifest your way out of every circumstance. But you can ask another question.

What can I do with what I have?

That's how businesses begin. That's how art begins. That's how communities begin. That's how movements begin. That's how somebody with almost no money looks around and invents the next step. I've done that my entire life.

Sometimes brilliantly. Sometimes stupidly. Sometimes ethically. Sometimes in ways where I look back and think:

Yeah, maybe don't fucking do that again.

But the underlying instinct remains valuable. There is another possibility. Find it. I want people to feel that. Especially people who have spent their lives being told they're too much. Too weird.

Too scattered. Too emotional. Too quiet. Too loud. Too old. Too inexperienced.

Too late. Too poor. Too whatever-the-fuck somebody decided they were. I want to ask them three questions.

Who are you?

What do you believe?

What do you want to do with your life?

Then I'd probably say: Okay. Let's try something. Not: Let's develop the perfect twenty-year plan. Not:

Let's wait until you're confident. Not: Let's get everybody's permission. Try something. Put yourself into the world. See what happens.

Maybe it works. Maybe you eat a shit sandwich. I've eaten plenty. Then adjust. Try again. That's the part motivational bullshit usually leaves out.

They show the successful person standing on the stage. They don't show the declined card. The divorce. The shitty apartment. The failed offer. The thing nobody bought.

The post nobody liked. The woman who said no. The client who disappeared. The photograph that sucked. The song you recorded three fucking times because the drums sounded terrible. That's creation too.

Creation contains failure because creation contains uncertainty. If you already know exactly what happens, you're reproducing. Creation asks you to enter a place where the answer does not exist yet. That's why courage matters. You have to tolerate looking stupid. You have to tolerate being wrong.

You have to tolerate somebody not understanding. You have to tolerate the possibility that the thing in your head will look fucking terrible when it first enters reality. Then you work with it. That's agency again. And I think we desperately need more of it. People who can imagine another possibility.

People who can make things. People who can solve things. People who can connect people. People who can tell stories. People who can take pain and transform it instead of simply transmitting the pain to somebody else. Imagine that.

What if instead of handing every wound directly to another human being, we learned more ways to transform some of it? Make the song. Write the page. Build the program. Start the group. Plant the garden.

Teach the class. Fix the thing. Tell somebody the story. Make something useful from the fucking mess. Maybe that's what I've been doing all along. Trying to make something useful from the mess.

Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes ugly. Sometimes profitable. Sometimes completely fucking pointless except that it kept me alive for another night. All of it counts. And that's where this becomes bigger than me.

Because I don't want somebody to finish this book and think:

Wow. Charlie has lived an interesting life.

Great. Thank you. But that's not enough. I want you to start thinking about yours. What have you survived? What have you noticed?

What do you know that somebody else doesn't? What did your grandmother teach you? What did your father play in the truck? What did somebody say to you when you were twelve that you still fucking hear today? What did you lose? Who did you love?

What are you embarrassed about? What makes you furious? What makes you lose track of time? What do you keep saying you're going to do someday? What is sitting in your fucking head right now that does not exist anywhere else? That's your material.

Not mine. Yours. You don't need my life. You need to notice your own. That's where the work begins. And maybe you don't call yourself creative.

I don't give a shit. The label doesn't matter. Make dinner differently tonight. Write one paragraph. Take one photograph. Ask somebody one question.

Fix something that's been broken. Pick up the guitar. Draw the barn. Build the website. Call the person. Try the idea.

Start embarrassingly small. Then pay attention to what happens inside you. That is the experiment. Because the greatest thing creativity has given me isn't a photograph. It isn't a song. It isn't money.

It isn't New York. It isn't Colombia. It isn't a career. It isn't even this book. It's the belief that when I encounter the unknown, I can respond. I can make something.

I can move. I can try. I can participate. I have agency. And once somebody discovers that inside themselves, they're harder to put in a fucking box. Maybe that's why creativity matters so much to me.

It reminds us that the world is unfinished. So are we. There are still blank pages. Unrecorded songs. Unmade photographs. Unasked questions.

Businesses that don't exist. Problems nobody has solved. People you haven't met. Places you haven't gone. Versions of yourself you haven't become. There is still room.

And maybe my professor was right. You insert yourself into the world. Then the world starts carving around you. Not because the world owes you anything. It doesn't. But because you finally gave it something to respond to.

That's the bargain. You have to go first. Make the thing. Say the thing. Ask. Show up.

Risk looking stupid. Put something where nothing existed before. Then see what happens. Somebody may encounter it. Maybe it changes them. Maybe they carry a little piece of it somewhere else.

Maybe they teach it to somebody. Maybe years later a photograph arrives in your inbox from a man holding his daughter on the other side of the world. And suddenly you understand: The thing you made stopped belonging only to you a long fucking time ago. Grandma never knew how far her photographs would travel. I probably won't know how far mine travel either.

None of us do. Maybe that's the beautiful part. We make things. We put pieces of ourselves into them. We hand them to the world. And the world carries them places we'll never see.

That's enough reason for me to keep making. Tomorrow, I'll make something else.