#101 I believe in manifestation now?

Earlier this month the photographer Mathieu Bitton came through Chicago with Dave Chappelle. I took him out for sushi.

I bragged about being tight with marketing guys at Midwest furniture brands. Mathieu told stories about Beyoncé and recently getting a hug and apology from Kanye West.

His stories were better.

He has a few about Prince. Like how, as a kid in Paris, he designed his own Prince album covers with Letraset. Then years later he actually designed an album cover with Prince.

We talked about his work. Process talk is usually trite and gross. This wasn’t. A lot of it was just around how much we both like the “work” part of working. He regularly puts on 30,000 steps when he’s back in Paris shooting on the street. I started my career lugging a hand truck full of magazines to the post office. I’ve imagined my career would end behind a hand truck of magazines as well.

The schlepping of heavy stuff is a critical part of being creative. Once other people start moving your stuff, you’re cooked.

My favorite work of Mathieu’s is his documentary photography. Especially his street photos of everything he loves about Paris, his childhood home. His father is Parisian and now has Alzheimer’s. The city is disappearing from his memory. I mentioned to Mathieu how his work is the document of a son saving the streets his father is forgetting.

Later, from his hotel room, he told me the thought had him choked up.

A week later I was moderating his artist talk at Leica Gallery.

It’s a Saturday in a sold out, second-floor gallery across from the Water Tower. We share the same dry dad-humor. It helped. The conversation went personal in public. Loss. Grief. The fight to define your best work, and then the harder fight to make it.

Afterward he signed books and I signed the new issue of Sixtysix. I leave a big white space across from the TOC for exactly this.

People kept coming up after to say what the openness meant to them. Someone emailed that they’d recorded and transcribed the whole thing. The Leica obsessives sent me dozens of photos.

Mathieu believes in manifestation. In The Secret, tell the universe what you want and it delivers. His whole life keeps cooperating with the theory.

I used to file his kind of stories under luck, but I’m a believer now.

Maybe “the secret is attention.” He pays it like few people I’ve met. It’s the skill under every great photographer. Every great anything.

You choose what to pay attention to. That choice turns out to be one of the biggest decisions you get to make in life.

The new issue of Sixtysix is available here.