Hypnotized

I get requests from young men who want to go in for colour printing and they say: "I'd like to come and have you teach me how to make colour prints." I tell them that the way to make colour prints is to get the materials and start making them. It's all adequately written out by Eastman Kodak. They don't really need any more guidance than that. But they want a short cut. They want to have instant success. I've noticed that over and over again and it's a rather disturbing thing. You know, it's laziness in a sense. Here they are in their twenties, they have plenty of time, their lives are ahead of them, so they can learn to master a process if they are diligent and work on it. But they don't want to do this, they think there is something mysterious about it.
When I started doing it, during the end of the war period, there wasn't anybody to consult about anything. There were just a few directions given with the products that I bought and some articles on colour reproduction in the journal of the Optical Society of America, which suggested ways of doing it, but nothing else. Why not set to work and learn something? That's what I can't understand.
Eliot Porter

Dialogue with Photography, Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper