The main reason why, after so many years, I still have such great enthusiasm for looking at photographs and such great hope every time I meet my new students in a new lesson is because there always lies a personal approach which I hope the student, and future photographer, will be able to freely express. What we are asking for, therefore, is not something new in the sense of originality but something genuine. However, this aspect is perhaps one of the hardest for a student to understand or misunderstand. What does personal approach mean? It does not mean tastes, preferences, political views, and so forth. If I were to give an example that cannot be real but let's imagine it, perhaps we would all understand it more. If we take a child who has never seen a photograph and give them a camera, it is impossible for them not to make a personal photograph, to not have a personal approach because they simply do not have another one. As we grow up and become educated, we educate ourselves but we are far from becoming wise; we burden ourselves, our souls, our minds with various things like the photographs of others, the photographs we admire, works of art, ideas, opinions, and naturally, events of our lives. And all these things pass much more easily through the place of our personal approaches because the personal approach requires from us a great cultivation and, I would say, a great attention of an artist. By working with photography, learning how to handle the medium, we essentially protect ourselves from the easy use of ready-made answers. Therefore, the personal approach is not something conquered on the first day, but it is achieved after we somehow dominate the vocabulary of the medium of photography so that we can be unaffected by what is not ours—what is ours are our experiences, our memories, our character, and the people and artists we love. If, at some point, we manage to marry our past, our psyche with our preferences, then we will have a personal perspective on the world. This is not achieved with books, nor with the internet, nor with many hours of work as some think. But with a little effort to become slightly wiser, approaching the level of a small child to whom, however, we have added the knowledge that will help us use the language of art. This personal approach, when it begins to show, gives us great joy whether we are spectators or creators.