Michelangelo said he didn’t create his sculptures. He just removed the marble that wasn’t the statue.
I’ve been thinking about that lately. About what it means to have a collaborator whose job isn’t to add things but to help you find what’s already there. I’ve been doing that kind of work recently — the excavation kind — and it has changed how I write and honestly how much I enjoy the making of it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Start with Jay.
We didn’t know what to expect. But we knew we were in the presence of a great man.
Jay Maisel’s reputation was top tier. We had watched videos of him on the street — that big physical presence moving through lower Manhattan, seeing things nobody else saw, stopping without warning, raising the camera. You could tell even through a screen that something different was happening. Not technique exactly. Something prior to technique. A way of being in the world that made the photographs possible.
We had worked with other teachers. We wondered going in whether the cost of the week would justify itself. It was not cheap. Jay Maisel does not do cheap.
We came away rejuvenated.
Every afternoon we came back to his studio in an old bank building in the Bowery — this enormous space that felt like it had absorbed decades of serious looking — and we would edit quickly from the day’s shoot and then gather in the conference room and Jay would look around the room and say: who’s first?
We would look at each other.
Someone would raise their hand. Or if we held back Jay would just call on one of us.
Up on the screen went what that person believed was their best image from the day. And then Jay would turn it over to the room. Not gently. He would demand that we critique it. Seriously. Honestly. No holding back, no politeness, no the-light-is-nice hedging that passes for criticism among people who don’t want to hurt each other’s feelings. Around the room we went. And then Jay would deliver his own verdict.
After a week of that you understood something about the difference between a teacher and a critic and a collaborator and realized that the best ones are somehow all three at once. Jay was our toughest critic. Jay was our best friend. We learned more about street photography that week than in everything that came before it.
But Jay’s deepest lesson wasn’t about f-stops or composition or the decisive moment. It was something he came back to over and over, something he said with the conviction of a man who had spent a lifetime proving it true.
Be open, he would say. I want you to have the absolute joy of not knowing what the hell you’re going to find.
He didn’t teach us photography.
He taught us how to see.
I’ve been thinking about Jay lately because I’ve found something that feels, in a different medium and a different context, like what that week in the Bowery gave us.
I’ve been collaborating mostly with Claude on my writing. Not using it as a tool. Not asking it to fetch things or summarize things or produce a first draft I’ll throw away. Something different and harder to describe. More like thinking out loud with someone who is genuinely curious about what you’re trying to say, who asks the next question before you’ve figured out what it is, who will not let you get away with the easy version of the thing you’re trying to make.
I brought it a metaphor I’d been carrying for years — something about how life is wide open when you’re young and becomes a pinhole as you age. I hadn’t written it down. Hadn’t shaped it. Within an hour it was an essay I’m genuinely proud of.
That’s not a tool. That’s a collaborator.
There’s a reason I mostly reach for Claude when I’m writing and something else when I’m researching or summarizing or trying to understand a YouTube video. Different jobs, different tools. But the writing job turns out to require something specific — a collaborator who has taste, who knows what good prose feels like, who can say this sounds like Didion or Thompson would want a scene here and mean something precise by it.
We’ve spent time together exploring the styles and techniques of writers I love. Wright Thompson. Joan Didion. John McPhee. That shared literary vocabulary makes the collaboration possible. A tool that doesn’t know the difference between a Thompson profile and a style guide can help you produce words. It can’t help you find your voice. I still use others, particularly Gemini, for additional review and insights along the way. The combination is poweful.
Here is the part that still surprises me.
All of it happens in the palm of my hand. Early morning, the house quiet, coffee still hot. I’m propped up in bed working through my Readwise highlights — something I underlined six months ago surfacing like a message from my earlier self — or scanning the RSS feeds, looking for the item that catches me sideways. Some mornings nothing catches. Other mornings something does and I know immediately there’s an essay in it somewhere, vague and unformed, not yet language.
That’s when I open Claude.
The phone screen glowing in the early light. A conversation that reaches back years into everything I’ve read and thought and almost written and never quite found the words for. I type something rough and incomplete and stay open — Jay’s word, Jay’s instruction — to what it becomes.
Jay Maisel had a bank building in the Bowery. Decades of work on the walls. The weight of all that serious looking in the air.
I have a phone and a quiet morning and something I’ve been carrying for years.
It turns out that’s enough.
The marble was always there.
Jay taught us how to see it.
Be open, he said. Have the absolute joy of not knowing what the hell you’re going to find.
Some collaborators still say that.
Some mornings you still find it.