"Many photographers get lost in the search for technical excellence instead of exploring new ways to grow in artistic excellence."

Take a good look at this picture. It seems to defy every rule of photography -- it's grainy, it's terribly unsharp, It's in black and white, and there even seems to be some motion blur.

I shot this in 1962 on an assignment from Show Magazine. The assignment was basically to show what it was like to be at the Peppermint Lounge, home of Chubby Checker and The Twist, hangout for celebrities, etc.

There were already lots of straight, sharp, well-focused pictures of the place, so I decided to try something different. I would try to capture the spirit of what was happening, rather than a literal image.

The picture was taken with a lens that I built. It's basically an objective from an English rifle-scope, mounted on a focusing mount taken from a Russian FED camera. Its main quality was that, due to extreme curvature of field, it was only sharp in the center.

I shot by available light on Tri-X film, and this is the result. I thought it conveyed the atmosphere of the place very well. You can Google the Peppermint Lounge, then click on "Images" to see how my shot compares with the others.