Barry Lopez, an award-winning author, discontinued his career as a photographer in 1981. Although photography played a great role in his life, he felt that it was distracting to his work as a writer. The amount of time he spent trying to focus the camera to capture an encounter would make him forget crucial details. He also felt uncomfortable with the way photographs turned events into a single moment. He stresses over the fact that he “makes photographs” rather than “takes them” as a way of explaining the importance of experiencing something before recording it – All because he fears that photography is becoming a practice of simply preserving an occasion, rather than actually participating in it and wanting to record it as a way of reliving
