"I wanted to be an artist and I couldn't draw."

   This one could be called “Helen Levitt speaks to me from the grave."

   Ms. Levitt died recently at the age of 95. I had never heard of her until I stumbled across her obituary in the Boston Globe.  It described her as “a master of street photography whose images of children playing in New York during the late 1930s and early '40s are classics of 20th-century photography … .”  

   She was, according to the Globe, “famous for her diffidence, rarely sitting for interviews and sometimes going years without taking photographs.” She once said that people often asked her what her photographs meant, "And I don't have a good answer for them. You see what you see."

   And how did this diffident master become a photographer?  She dropped out of high school to learn photography by working for a commercial photographer in the Bronx.  "I wanted to be a photographer," she said, "because I wanted to be an artist and I couldn't draw … ."

   And so she made her art the way she could.  

   So should we all.

   Here’s to all the untrained masses who tote their digital cameras around in their coat pockets and briefcases and bags -- looking, looking, looking, for something that calls to them. Something that compels them to snap away, confirming for themselves and maybe others, too, that there is beauty in the world and that they see the world with something of an artist’s eye, even if they lack the artist’s hand.