Louie Schwartzberg on Gratitude at TEDxSF (Full Transcript)

Louie Schwartzberg

Full text of filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg’s talk on Gratitude at TEDxSF conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Louie Schwartzberg on Gratitude at TEDxSF

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everybody. Feel like I’m in a revival. This is great.

It’s great to be back in my old stomping grounds of San Francisco. When I graduated UCLA, I moved to Northern California and I lived in a little town called Elk on the Mendocino coast. And I didn’t have a phone or TV, but I had US mail.

And life was good back then if you could remember it. I’d go to the general store for a cup of coffee and a brownie. And I’d ship my film to San Francisco, and low and behold, two days later it would end up on my front door, which was way better than having to fight the traffic of Hollywood.

I didn’t have much money, but I had time and a sense of wonder. So I started shooting time-lapse photography. It would take me a month to shoot a four minutes roll of film because that’s all I could afford.

I’ve been shooting time-lapse flowers continuously, non-stop, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for over 30 years. And to see them move is a dance I’ll never get tired of. Their beauty immerses us with color, taste, touch. It also provides a third of the food we eat.

Beauty and seduction is nature’s tools for survival because we protect what we fall in love with. It opens our hearts and makes us realize we are a part of nature and we’re not separate from it.