"I went to Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara for a year and a half," Kennedy continues. "The goal of Brooks was to develop commercially successful photographers. I wanted to learn technology, not S-curve composition. To me, technology is what a school can teach you. I didn't want someone to tell me what good composition was. I figured if I didn't intuitively feel it then the rest of my life would be spent constantly thinking, 'If I put that over there then that will be the top of the S. If I put that over there that will balance the other half.'.What I wanted was to master technical things in order to make them do what I wanted. You can develop vision in someone but I don't agree that you can teach creativity".

"I think the best photography is intuitive," says Kennedy. "My wife Lucy doesn't work in technical terms. She has no idea of cameras, f-stops. But, I wish some of my pictures were as beautiful as hers. Her intuition is fantastic. I'm always calling her in and asking, 'Is this good? What do you think? Did I do good? Is this the right one, Lucy?' She's probably my best editor. She does hair and make-up for me and keeps the studio functioning. I couldn't do it without her."

Once out of Brooks, Kennedy moved up to northern California, settling in a small town on the California/Oregon border for the next two years. "I opened a little photography studio in a place called WACO," he elaborates, "Western Artists' Cooperative. We had a huge 40,000- foot warehouse right on the bay where I began shooting a lot of nature in addition to portraits. But, I had back trouble and none of the doctors in California seemed to know what the problem was. So I came back to New York at 22 to have surgery, figuring I'd go back to California after about six months. That was in 1973. I'm still here."

"When I got out of the hospital," Kennedy remembers, "I planned on freelancing as an assistant. The level of what I was doing in California was not real high. I was doing some good pictures and having a lot of fun. But looking back, I was still really a beginner. So, I started working for a few people and ended up getting a full-time job for a still-life photographer, Rudy Legname. I worked for him for about a year and a half and learned an incredible amount about lighting technique. He was an exquisite photographer. I love his work and it was good for me because it was still-life. When I left Rudy I was able, through his training, to start my own studio. I began with one Nikon and one lens. But, I was truly lucky when I left him because I had made good relations with all my suppliers. So, when I opened my own place, I had wonderful credit and a lot of people behind me."

For a year or year and a half Kennedy tested, moving towards fashion, which he feels is the most accessible outlet for a young photographer. "But, I really couldn't plug into the fashion industry," he recalls. "I was from the country and fashion and I just didn't connect." At the same time, Kennedy began to hit the advertising agencies, acquiring quite a bit of work from Benton and Bowles including Charmin toilet tissue and Dawn dishwashing liquid assignments.

"All this time I didn't have a rep," says Kennedy. "It was just word of mouth and me seeing people. Then an art director who I had worked with at B&B went to CBS advertising. She used me on her first job there. Within a couple of weeks I was working for seven or eight designers in the CBS ad department. A month or two later I was working for all of them. So it snowballed. I was getting great stuff. One assignment called for a picture of a tree and I was able to go up to Woodstock for two days just to photograph nature. I was doing what I really loved. Yet, I made the mistake that many photographers make - one client. When they cut all the budgets at CBS I was out in the cold. I had a few small jobs in the works but nothing mainstream.

Kennedy decided to target the record industry with full force hoping to do the kind of photography that he thoroughly enjoyed. He wanted to do album covers but it was difficult to make the transition from working for an ad department to producing covers. "I sat for a while trying to figure out what to do and ended up starting a portrait project of the top album-cover art directors in New