Monday, October 27, 2008
The Boston Molasses Disaster, also known as the Great Molasses Flood and the Great Boston Molasses Tragedy, occurred on January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts in the United States. A large molasses tank burst and a wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph (56 km/h), killing 21 and injuring 150. The event has entered local folklore, and residents claim that on hot summer days the area still smells of molasses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_molasses_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_molasses_disaster
Bill Walton, the radical Celtic of basketball renown, told of a puckish Abbie Hoffman, then underground evading a cocaine charge in the '70s, leaping from the shadows on a New York street to give him an impromptu basketball lesson after a loss to the Knicks. "Abbie was not a fugitive from justice," said Mr. Walton. "Justice was a fugitive from him."
Found this in Vice magazine:
Everyone was calm for a while. Then the drunk man said, “I am going to kill everyone here. Is everyone okay with that? Is everyone in this cell okay with that? Let’s get our word on that, okay? Raise your hand if you’re okay with this.” He touched the skinny Hispanic. The skinny Hispanic stood with an angry facial expression and said, “Don’t hit me. Don’t hit me.” The bald Caucasian stood in front of the drunk man. The bald Caucasian had an angry facial expression. The police took the drunk man out of the cell. From outside the cell he screamed at the skinny Hispanic and the bald Caucasian, who was short and fat. He screamed at bald Caucasian, “You are never working in the union again.” The bald Caucasian said, “Union? What the fuck are you talking about? I’m a drug dealer about to go away for a long time.”
The police were holding the drunk man. “Where’s your union now, bitch?” said the bald Caucasian. The police put the drunk man in another cell. “I get in a stupid bar fight and I’m covered in blood,” screamed the drunk man. “And I’m the one in jail. What about the other guy?”
“I thought you were in Starbucks?” said a cop.
“I was taking a shit in Starbucks and I came out and some guy hits me,” said the drunk man. “I was in Starbucks. You don’t believe me? I was in fucking McSorley’s, the oldest bar… you motherfuckers. This isn’t fair.”
Everyone was calm for a while. Then the drunk man said, “I am going to kill everyone here. Is everyone okay with that? Is everyone in this cell okay with that? Let’s get our word on that, okay? Raise your hand if you’re okay with this.” He touched the skinny Hispanic. The skinny Hispanic stood with an angry facial expression and said, “Don’t hit me. Don’t hit me.” The bald Caucasian stood in front of the drunk man. The bald Caucasian had an angry facial expression. The police took the drunk man out of the cell. From outside the cell he screamed at the skinny Hispanic and the bald Caucasian, who was short and fat. He screamed at bald Caucasian, “You are never working in the union again.” The bald Caucasian said, “Union? What the fuck are you talking about? I’m a drug dealer about to go away for a long time.”
The police were holding the drunk man. “Where’s your union now, bitch?” said the bald Caucasian. The police put the drunk man in another cell. “I get in a stupid bar fight and I’m covered in blood,” screamed the drunk man. “And I’m the one in jail. What about the other guy?”
“I thought you were in Starbucks?” said a cop.
“I was taking a shit in Starbucks and I came out and some guy hits me,” said the drunk man. “I was in Starbucks. You don’t believe me? I was in fucking McSorley’s, the oldest bar… you motherfuckers. This isn’t fair.”
A book review for a biography of photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, by his friend David Young:
Having risked hernia to browse the impressive new book of an old friend and neighbor, ( W. Eugene Smith; Photographs 1934-1975 John T. Hill/Gilles Mora) what first grabs is the space, air and light enveloping these intense images with almost a loving caress, a sense of freshness and sunlight never possible in our dim, dingy-dusty claustrophobic Sixth Avenue loft building, where, just outside my studio door, were piled stacks upon stacks of his work mounted on black 16x20 dogeared mats, just waiting to be stolen, but which were, in fact, attributed by many visitors to some magical drugstore, and could I, please, arrange to have their wedding pictures made there, too? Gene couldn't sell one print for even twenty-five bucks in those days. Every night when I came home to sleep there was the despairing Clement Attlee staring upward at the bare light bulb over my doorway.
That was forty years ago, and twenty since Gene went to that great blast of ferrocyanide in the sky, and much ado about him has taken place in the interim. New York fifties mindset was Freudian psychoanalysis; everyone went to a shrink. Any prominent individualistic tendencies were often condemned to one definition of neurosis or another, and in the rather small and specious world of photography , Gene's maverick determination stood out in high relief. Businessmen photographers-- like the young Lee Friedlander, himself awash in Freudophilia, considered Gene a 'spoiler', pretentious-precious, and went instead to sit at the feet of the polymorphous Walker Evans; yes, "pomposity" was pretty much the legend that Gene's exit from LIFE brought down around his head. Not a team player at all; tsk tsk. And in his brave repudiation of corporate moloch, Gene valiantly pratfalled himself right into the lap of utter poverty.
To large extent, Gene's persona seemed to require a struggle against impossible odds; it focused and sharpened him to the high standards he demanded from himself , and he was no slouch when it came to grandstanding, often with tears, his anti-Goliath position. He built his own Myth of Smith, his self-invented public (relations?) image, fine when LIFE was footing the bill, but now, inside our firetrap former whorehouse , there was real rent to pay, real electric bills, bona fide empty refrigerators. That is about when we began to get acquainted--- I never really bought the Myth; for me he was just the strangely interesting guy downstairs who became a great pal.
Outside the loft, Gene was quick to acquire the packagable cliche of the garret-starved self-destructive artist. Compared to Van Gogh, he earned some residue of American Puritan contempt; this man whose great humanity was most evident in his work was treated most inhumanely by his peers.
Inside the loft, for many years the two of us were in daily contact, working and trying to exist under extremely difficult economic circumstances, and we often had one helluva good time!! I found him to be a genial, generous, courageous---often outrageous-- warm wildly witty man, always humble, sensitive, shy and hard-working, sharing a great interest in art, with a remarkable philosophical perspective. We jabbered of Welles and Chaplin , wide angle lenses, witches, Goya, Haiti, Satchmo, Stravinsky, O'Casey, Joyce, Kazan, war, suicide, politics, cock-fought over girls, guzzled cheap scotch, and swung with the jazz that regularly took place in my studio , as if great mind trips could avert the cold fact of the necessity to eat. I remember one hot summer day, making cream cheese and molasses sandwiches for us on cinamon bread. Gene argued that we didn't have to buy the molasses because we could get the iron from our rusty tap water. As a rule, his antic humor and punning sense managed always to keep things slightly off-balance; this man who had such a profoundly dramatic instinct and attraction for the tragic had also a capricious spirit of the absurd in the way he conducted his daily life; Van Gogh with a manic dash of Robin Williams.
And astonishingly productive. Yet always the gloomy impassioned chairoscuro came out of the darkroom-- prints blacker than black, then mounted on black, dense, intense, often in layout strangulation, making sure; I , W. Eugene Smith , won't let you go gently into that unferrocyanided good night. Sans assignments, now more artist than journalist, for years on end Gene shuffled his prints, made and remade PITTSBURG, photographed our jazz and our personal La Boheme, tried a failed book, a failed magazine, and finally luck brought him The Jewish Museum show and then his crescendo, Minimata.
One night in Bradley's in 1975, Gene said, "Well, Dave, I finally got there at last. I've got ten thousand dollars in the bank for the first time. Of course, it's only going to be there about a week."
Jump cut posthumous; an icon, passed away amongst us, is now suddenly acknowledged. Many who jeered him, refused him recognition, now come out to sycophant, to pedestal, to celebrate his life-- including LIFE itself. Gee, we're SO sorry; but let's exploit!
Those twenty-five dollar prints buckled the registers at auctions, and giant profits were made; yes, the same old art-woe story--- just at the time Vinnie the Gogh himself was pulling down millions in Sotheby sales. The dark side of Gene, finally, surely, took care of his children and at least one of his wives.
We get a brilliant and sensitive biography by Jim Hughes, a soso documentary, worldwide traveling shows. And then it seemed over. "There's no money left around for Gene Smith anymore" comments executor John Morris in the late eighties, handing his stewardship over to Gene's bastard son.
Now, surprise! comes this current coffee table dominatrix which gives Gene's babies, his pictures, the opportunity to have a life of their own in renewal. SNAP!! Of course one can argue anew the merits of the individual essays and which choices are the best, etc., but for myself-- having gone to bed amidst these images for many years, there's something new about them now; suddenly welcome. There is a spank-spank/no-no here; not all of what we see are Gene's own prints, very much against the artist's wishes, but the damage is by no means on the level of, say, Clement Greenberg's sanding off the paint on David Smith's sculptures after his death. And most of these choices help illuminate Gene's way of seeing and working. There are also textual inaccuracies; Hall Overton did not own the loft bldg. I had rented three floors, and Hall rented originally from me, and my friend Sid Grossman sent over Harold Feinstein to share Hall's floor. When Harold left, he brought in Gene.
I liked John Hill's technical essay at the closure. I was with Gene the night MAD EYES burnt out all the surrounding background, with ritual Clan MacGregor celebration, for neither of us-- one painter, one photographer-- gave a whit about 'objectivity'.
This spacious book-bomb adds honor and light to these master photographs, allowing them their own life and breathing room not usually available. Gene's insistence on control force-gilded his lilies, giving barely any space in his layouts to let the eye feel free to wander on its own volition. Now one can look afresh with impunity, and they look a bit different--even better.
In any event, Gene, now busily groping angels, can no longer argue in his own defense, no longer joke, weep, holler, cajole, rage, pun. And he doesn't need to.
You know? This fellow really had one goddamned great eye and sense of when.
David X Young
Having risked hernia to browse the impressive new book of an old friend and neighbor, ( W. Eugene Smith; Photographs 1934-1975 John T. Hill/Gilles Mora) what first grabs is the space, air and light enveloping these intense images with almost a loving caress, a sense of freshness and sunlight never possible in our dim, dingy-dusty claustrophobic Sixth Avenue loft building, where, just outside my studio door, were piled stacks upon stacks of his work mounted on black 16x20 dogeared mats, just waiting to be stolen, but which were, in fact, attributed by many visitors to some magical drugstore, and could I, please, arrange to have their wedding pictures made there, too? Gene couldn't sell one print for even twenty-five bucks in those days. Every night when I came home to sleep there was the despairing Clement Attlee staring upward at the bare light bulb over my doorway.
That was forty years ago, and twenty since Gene went to that great blast of ferrocyanide in the sky, and much ado about him has taken place in the interim. New York fifties mindset was Freudian psychoanalysis; everyone went to a shrink. Any prominent individualistic tendencies were often condemned to one definition of neurosis or another, and in the rather small and specious world of photography , Gene's maverick determination stood out in high relief. Businessmen photographers-- like the young Lee Friedlander, himself awash in Freudophilia, considered Gene a 'spoiler', pretentious-precious, and went instead to sit at the feet of the polymorphous Walker Evans; yes, "pomposity" was pretty much the legend that Gene's exit from LIFE brought down around his head. Not a team player at all; tsk tsk. And in his brave repudiation of corporate moloch, Gene valiantly pratfalled himself right into the lap of utter poverty.
To large extent, Gene's persona seemed to require a struggle against impossible odds; it focused and sharpened him to the high standards he demanded from himself , and he was no slouch when it came to grandstanding, often with tears, his anti-Goliath position. He built his own Myth of Smith, his self-invented public (relations?) image, fine when LIFE was footing the bill, but now, inside our firetrap former whorehouse , there was real rent to pay, real electric bills, bona fide empty refrigerators. That is about when we began to get acquainted--- I never really bought the Myth; for me he was just the strangely interesting guy downstairs who became a great pal.
Outside the loft, Gene was quick to acquire the packagable cliche of the garret-starved self-destructive artist. Compared to Van Gogh, he earned some residue of American Puritan contempt; this man whose great humanity was most evident in his work was treated most inhumanely by his peers.
Inside the loft, for many years the two of us were in daily contact, working and trying to exist under extremely difficult economic circumstances, and we often had one helluva good time!! I found him to be a genial, generous, courageous---often outrageous-- warm wildly witty man, always humble, sensitive, shy and hard-working, sharing a great interest in art, with a remarkable philosophical perspective. We jabbered of Welles and Chaplin , wide angle lenses, witches, Goya, Haiti, Satchmo, Stravinsky, O'Casey, Joyce, Kazan, war, suicide, politics, cock-fought over girls, guzzled cheap scotch, and swung with the jazz that regularly took place in my studio , as if great mind trips could avert the cold fact of the necessity to eat. I remember one hot summer day, making cream cheese and molasses sandwiches for us on cinamon bread. Gene argued that we didn't have to buy the molasses because we could get the iron from our rusty tap water. As a rule, his antic humor and punning sense managed always to keep things slightly off-balance; this man who had such a profoundly dramatic instinct and attraction for the tragic had also a capricious spirit of the absurd in the way he conducted his daily life; Van Gogh with a manic dash of Robin Williams.
And astonishingly productive. Yet always the gloomy impassioned chairoscuro came out of the darkroom-- prints blacker than black, then mounted on black, dense, intense, often in layout strangulation, making sure; I , W. Eugene Smith , won't let you go gently into that unferrocyanided good night. Sans assignments, now more artist than journalist, for years on end Gene shuffled his prints, made and remade PITTSBURG, photographed our jazz and our personal La Boheme, tried a failed book, a failed magazine, and finally luck brought him The Jewish Museum show and then his crescendo, Minimata.
One night in Bradley's in 1975, Gene said, "Well, Dave, I finally got there at last. I've got ten thousand dollars in the bank for the first time. Of course, it's only going to be there about a week."
Jump cut posthumous; an icon, passed away amongst us, is now suddenly acknowledged. Many who jeered him, refused him recognition, now come out to sycophant, to pedestal, to celebrate his life-- including LIFE itself. Gee, we're SO sorry; but let's exploit!
Those twenty-five dollar prints buckled the registers at auctions, and giant profits were made; yes, the same old art-woe story--- just at the time Vinnie the Gogh himself was pulling down millions in Sotheby sales. The dark side of Gene, finally, surely, took care of his children and at least one of his wives.
We get a brilliant and sensitive biography by Jim Hughes, a soso documentary, worldwide traveling shows. And then it seemed over. "There's no money left around for Gene Smith anymore" comments executor John Morris in the late eighties, handing his stewardship over to Gene's bastard son.
Now, surprise! comes this current coffee table dominatrix which gives Gene's babies, his pictures, the opportunity to have a life of their own in renewal. SNAP!! Of course one can argue anew the merits of the individual essays and which choices are the best, etc., but for myself-- having gone to bed amidst these images for many years, there's something new about them now; suddenly welcome. There is a spank-spank/no-no here; not all of what we see are Gene's own prints, very much against the artist's wishes, but the damage is by no means on the level of, say, Clement Greenberg's sanding off the paint on David Smith's sculptures after his death. And most of these choices help illuminate Gene's way of seeing and working. There are also textual inaccuracies; Hall Overton did not own the loft bldg. I had rented three floors, and Hall rented originally from me, and my friend Sid Grossman sent over Harold Feinstein to share Hall's floor. When Harold left, he brought in Gene.
I liked John Hill's technical essay at the closure. I was with Gene the night MAD EYES burnt out all the surrounding background, with ritual Clan MacGregor celebration, for neither of us-- one painter, one photographer-- gave a whit about 'objectivity'.
This spacious book-bomb adds honor and light to these master photographs, allowing them their own life and breathing room not usually available. Gene's insistence on control force-gilded his lilies, giving barely any space in his layouts to let the eye feel free to wander on its own volition. Now one can look afresh with impunity, and they look a bit different--even better.
In any event, Gene, now busily groping angels, can no longer argue in his own defense, no longer joke, weep, holler, cajole, rage, pun. And he doesn't need to.
You know? This fellow really had one goddamned great eye and sense of when.
David X Young
Photojournalism in 5 minutes: notes from personal pages of Magnum photographers
Abbas - "My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity - the suspended moment - intervenes during action, in the viewfinder."
Christopher Anderson - Quote: "Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that it is just a trick."
Eve Arnold - Quote: "If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument."
Micha Bar-Am - Quote: "If you're too close to events, you lose perspective. It is not easy to be fair with the facts and keep your own convictions out of the picture. It is almost impossible to be both a participant in the events and their observer, witness, interpreter."
Bruno Barbey - Quote: "Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world."
Jonas Bendicksen - Quote: "I love working on stories that get left behind in the race for the daily headlines - journalistic orphans. Often, the most worthwhile and convincing images tend to lurk within the hidden, oblique stories that fly just below the radar."
Ian Berry - Quote: "The great single picture is emotionally satisfying, whereas getting a good journalistic story is more about being a professional."
Werner Bischof - Quote: "I felt compelled to venture forth and explore the true face of the world. Leading a satisfying life of plenty had blinded many of us to the immense hardships beyond our borders."
Rene Burri - Quote: "I never thought I would become a photographer."
Cornell Capa - Quote: "One thing that Life and I agreed right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family; I was to be a photographer of peace."
Robert Capa - Quote: "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough."
Henri Cartier-Bresson - Quote: "To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life."
Chien-Chi Chang - Quote: "Photography is still instinctual, but I am more disciplined now. I am trying to make every frame count, just as in Tai Chi every breath counts."
Antoine D'Agata - Quote: "It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it."
Bruce Davidson - Quote: "If I am looking for a story at all, it is in my relationship to the subject - the story that tells me, rather than that I tell."
Carl De Keyzer - Quote: "I want to question the images that are in our memory. There is always a double level in my work; what you see is true and at the same time not true."
Raymond Depardon - Quote: "The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him."
Thomas Dworzak - Quote: "I like the fact that I am not in control, that the photographs are what happens, rather than the result only of the decision I make. You could say that’s the downside of photography, but it’s also why it is magic."
Nikos Economopolous - Quote: "I prefer to spend my time in my corner of the world: south Europe and west Asia, where I understand the codes and can make connections."
Elliott Erwitt - Quote: "It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy."
Martine Franck - Quote: "A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected."
Stuart Franklin - Quote: "I love photographing. It's that simple."
Leonard Freed - Quote: "Ultimately photography is about who you are. It's the seeking of truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit."
Paul Fusco - Quote: "I want the viewers to be moved into the lives of the people that they are looking at, the visual experience is incredibly emotional."
Cristina Garcia Rodero - Quote:"I tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain in all its passion, love, humor, tenderness, rage, pain, in all its truth; and the fullest and most intense moments in the lives of these characters as simple as they are irresistible, with all their inner strength, as a personal challenge that gave me strength and understanding and in which I invested all my heart."
Jean Gaumy - Quote: "Taking pictures is like fishing or writing. It's getting out of the unknown that which resists and refuses to come to light."
Bruce Gilden - Quote "I'm known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get."
Burt Glinn - Quote: "I think that what you've got to do is discover the essential truth of the situation, and have a point of view about it."
Jim Goldberg - Quote: "My work is based in trust. I don't work well just snapping pictures, although some people would say the opposite. I really feel like intimacy and trust are the guide to my work."
Philip Jones Griffiths - Quote: "The ability to keep things in perspective is very important for a journalist. In a tense situation you need the ability to be there, yet somehow step aside; to keep a cool head and keep working without getting frustrated."
Harry Gruyaert - Quote: "I was living in London at the end of the 1960s when I became aware of the brainwashing power of television….I became interested in making a portrait of England by photographing the TV screen."
Philippe Halsman - Quote: "Most people stiffen with self-consciousness when they pose for a photograph. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment, so he can capture on his film their real, undistorted personality and character. "
Erich Hartmann - Quote: "A large portion of my work is concerned with people because people are the most inventive and news-making part of our lives. Yet I am as much attracted to the evidence of their presence and efforts, whether good or evil, as I am to the people themselves."
David Alan Harvey - Quote: "It's a lot of work living the life that you want to live, but that's what I'm doing."
Thomas Hoepker - Quote: "I am not an artist. I am an image maker".
David Hurn - Quote: "Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are."
Richard Kalvar - Quote: "The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography."
Josef Koudelka - Quote: "The maximum, that is what has always interested me."
Hiroji Kubota - Quote: "I love beautiful things, and I want to make pictures that lift people's spirits. I see the giving and receiving of photographs as something beautiful and personal."
Sergio Larrain - Quote: "A good image is created by a state of grace. Grace expresses itself when it has been freed from conventions, free like a child in his early discovery of the reality. The game is then to organize the rectangle."
Guy Le Querrec - Quote: "A photographer is an acrobat treading the high wire of chance, trying to capture shooting stars."
Erich Lessing - Quote: "I saw my job as providing documentation. I'm certainly not a storyteller in the way that a novelist is a storyteller. Reportage was not the sophisticated thing then that it is today."
Herbert List - Quote: "The pictures I took spontaneously - with a bliss-like sensation, as if they had long inhabited my unconscious - were often more powerful than those I had painstakingly composed. I grasped their magic as in passing. "
Alex Majoli - Quote: "We should think of a photographer as a Samurai who makes rituals, moves and gestures in order to develop his techniques and his instinct."
Constantine Manos - Quote: "The flow of people in a setting, their changing relationships to each other and their environment, and their constantly changing expressions and movements - all combine to create dynamic situations that provide the photographer with limitless choices of when to push the button. By choosing a precise intersection between subject and time, he may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the real into the surreal."
Peter Marlow - Quote: "Photographing news is all about being in the right place."
Steve McCurry - Quote: "What is important to my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling."
Susan Meiselas - Quote: "The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation."
Wayne Miller - Quote: "I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs."
Inge Morath - Quote: "To take pictures had become a necessity and I did not want to forgo it for anything."
Trent Parke - Quote: "The first pictures I shot were wet foot prints I'd left along a path. I just turned around and saw them and shot. It was a first picture and from that point it was the sort of thing I've photographed ever since - just things that I'm curious about, or saw, that I'm interested in...like dragon flies in a spider web."
Martin Parr - Quote: "With photography, I like to create fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist."
Paolo Pellegrin - Quote: "I'm more interested in a photography that is 'unfinished' - a photography that is suggestive and can trigger a conversation or dialogue. There are pictures that are closed, finished, to which there is no way in."
Gilles Peress - Quote:"I don't care so much anymore about 'good photography'; I am gathering evidence for history".
Gueorgui Pinkhassov - Quote: "The power of our Muse lies in her meaninglessness. Even the style can turn one into a slave if one does not run away from it, and then one is doomed to repeat oneself. The only thing that counts is curiosity. For me personally, this is what creativity is about. It will express itself less in the fear of doing the same thing over again than in the desire not to go where one has already been."
Mark Power - Quote: "Now that everyone in the developed world seems to own some form of camera, a different space has opened for documentary photographers. It's a space free from specific events, where there are different expectations, where it is first and foremost about ideas. Now we can all take pictures, with varying degrees of consistency, more than ever before it's about what we do with photography."
Raghu Rai - Quote: "A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever."
Eli Reed - Quote: "The main thing for me is that I'm happy that I've been able to work as a professional photographer. What is at the core of my work is, in essence, a mediation on being a human being."
Miguel Rio Branco - Quote: "Since the beginning, I have always relied on interbreeding. Painting meeting photography. Drawing meeting collage. Photography meeting cinema. Music meeting poetry. Poetry meeting montage. All these meetings are part of the many crossroads in the search for a comprehension and expression of myself in relation to the world."
George Rodger - Quote: "You must feel an affinity for what you are photographing. You must be part of it, and yet remain sufficiently detached to see it objectively. Like watching from the audience a play you already know by heart."
Lise Sarfati - Quote: "When using photography it is necessary to know your secret wills."
Ferdinando Scianna - Quote: "A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they does is just to open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world."
David Seymour - Quote: "'All you need,' he once said as a noted photographer orated on the psychology behind one of his pictures, 'is a little bit of luck and enough muscle to click the shutter.' He might have added: a good eye, a heart and a knowing nose for news. For all of these were obvious in his work."
(Judith Friedberg on David Seymour in "Photographic")
Marilyn Silverstone - Quote:"A photograph is a subjective impression. It is what the photographer sees. No matter how hard we try to get into the skin, into the feeling of the subject or situation, however much we empathize, it is still what we see that comes out in the images, it is our reaction to the subject and in the end, the whole corpus of our work becomes a portrait of ourselves."
Eugene Smith - Quote:"Photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes - just sometimes - one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought."
Alec Soth - Quote: "I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance."
Jacob Aue Sobol - Quote: "When I photograph, I try to use my instincts as much as possible. It is when pictures are thoughtless and irrational that they come to life; that they evolve from showing to being."
Chris Steele-Perkins - Quote: "Everything shifts as you move, and different things come into focus at different points of your life, and you try to articulate that."
Dennis Stock - Quote: "Art is a well-articulated manifestation of an aspect of life. I have been privileged to view much of life through my cameras, making the journey an enlightened experience. My emphasis has mainly been on affirmative reactions to human behavior and a strong attraction to the beauty in nature."
Mkhael Subotzky - Quote: "For me, photography has become a way of attempting to make sense of the very strange world that I see around me. I don't ever expect to achieve that understanding, but the fact that I am trying comforts me"
Larry Towell - Quote: "If there's one theme that connects all my work, I think it's that of land-lessness; how land makes people into who they are and what happens to them when they lose it and thus lose their identities."
John Vink - Quote: "Photography cannot do much. It provides some level of information, yet it has no pretensions about changing the world."
Alex Webb - Quote: "I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner."
Simon Wheatley - Quote: "The most important thing is: You don't give up. Believe in what you are doing. The moment you stop believing in a story you are doing then that story is over."
Donovan Wylie - Quote: "The idea of photography seemed to come together with the idea that this is how I could be - someone who could have one step in the world while at the same time being one step removed from it."
Patrick Zachmann - Quote: "Je suis devenu photographe parce que je n'ai pas de mémoire. La photographie me permet de reconstituer les albums de famille que je n'ai jamais eus, dont les images manquantes sont devenues le moteur de mes recherches. Mes planches-contacts sont mon journal intime."
Abbas - "My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity - the suspended moment - intervenes during action, in the viewfinder."
Christopher Anderson - Quote: "Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that it is just a trick."
Eve Arnold - Quote: "If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument."
Micha Bar-Am - Quote: "If you're too close to events, you lose perspective. It is not easy to be fair with the facts and keep your own convictions out of the picture. It is almost impossible to be both a participant in the events and their observer, witness, interpreter."
Bruno Barbey - Quote: "Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world."
Jonas Bendicksen - Quote: "I love working on stories that get left behind in the race for the daily headlines - journalistic orphans. Often, the most worthwhile and convincing images tend to lurk within the hidden, oblique stories that fly just below the radar."
Ian Berry - Quote: "The great single picture is emotionally satisfying, whereas getting a good journalistic story is more about being a professional."
Werner Bischof - Quote: "I felt compelled to venture forth and explore the true face of the world. Leading a satisfying life of plenty had blinded many of us to the immense hardships beyond our borders."
Rene Burri - Quote: "I never thought I would become a photographer."
Cornell Capa - Quote: "One thing that Life and I agreed right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family; I was to be a photographer of peace."
Robert Capa - Quote: "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough."
Henri Cartier-Bresson - Quote: "To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life."
Chien-Chi Chang - Quote: "Photography is still instinctual, but I am more disciplined now. I am trying to make every frame count, just as in Tai Chi every breath counts."
Antoine D'Agata - Quote: "It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it."
Bruce Davidson - Quote: "If I am looking for a story at all, it is in my relationship to the subject - the story that tells me, rather than that I tell."
Carl De Keyzer - Quote: "I want to question the images that are in our memory. There is always a double level in my work; what you see is true and at the same time not true."
Raymond Depardon - Quote: "The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him."
Thomas Dworzak - Quote: "I like the fact that I am not in control, that the photographs are what happens, rather than the result only of the decision I make. You could say that’s the downside of photography, but it’s also why it is magic."
Nikos Economopolous - Quote: "I prefer to spend my time in my corner of the world: south Europe and west Asia, where I understand the codes and can make connections."
Elliott Erwitt - Quote: "It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy."
Martine Franck - Quote: "A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected."
Stuart Franklin - Quote: "I love photographing. It's that simple."
Leonard Freed - Quote: "Ultimately photography is about who you are. It's the seeking of truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit."
Paul Fusco - Quote: "I want the viewers to be moved into the lives of the people that they are looking at, the visual experience is incredibly emotional."
Cristina Garcia Rodero - Quote:"I tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain in all its passion, love, humor, tenderness, rage, pain, in all its truth; and the fullest and most intense moments in the lives of these characters as simple as they are irresistible, with all their inner strength, as a personal challenge that gave me strength and understanding and in which I invested all my heart."
Jean Gaumy - Quote: "Taking pictures is like fishing or writing. It's getting out of the unknown that which resists and refuses to come to light."
Bruce Gilden - Quote "I'm known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get."
Burt Glinn - Quote: "I think that what you've got to do is discover the essential truth of the situation, and have a point of view about it."
Jim Goldberg - Quote: "My work is based in trust. I don't work well just snapping pictures, although some people would say the opposite. I really feel like intimacy and trust are the guide to my work."
Philip Jones Griffiths - Quote: "The ability to keep things in perspective is very important for a journalist. In a tense situation you need the ability to be there, yet somehow step aside; to keep a cool head and keep working without getting frustrated."
Harry Gruyaert - Quote: "I was living in London at the end of the 1960s when I became aware of the brainwashing power of television….I became interested in making a portrait of England by photographing the TV screen."
Philippe Halsman - Quote: "Most people stiffen with self-consciousness when they pose for a photograph. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment, so he can capture on his film their real, undistorted personality and character. "
Erich Hartmann - Quote: "A large portion of my work is concerned with people because people are the most inventive and news-making part of our lives. Yet I am as much attracted to the evidence of their presence and efforts, whether good or evil, as I am to the people themselves."
David Alan Harvey - Quote: "It's a lot of work living the life that you want to live, but that's what I'm doing."
Thomas Hoepker - Quote: "I am not an artist. I am an image maker".
David Hurn - Quote: "Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are."
Richard Kalvar - Quote: "The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography."
Josef Koudelka - Quote: "The maximum, that is what has always interested me."
Hiroji Kubota - Quote: "I love beautiful things, and I want to make pictures that lift people's spirits. I see the giving and receiving of photographs as something beautiful and personal."
Sergio Larrain - Quote: "A good image is created by a state of grace. Grace expresses itself when it has been freed from conventions, free like a child in his early discovery of the reality. The game is then to organize the rectangle."
Guy Le Querrec - Quote: "A photographer is an acrobat treading the high wire of chance, trying to capture shooting stars."
Erich Lessing - Quote: "I saw my job as providing documentation. I'm certainly not a storyteller in the way that a novelist is a storyteller. Reportage was not the sophisticated thing then that it is today."
Herbert List - Quote: "The pictures I took spontaneously - with a bliss-like sensation, as if they had long inhabited my unconscious - were often more powerful than those I had painstakingly composed. I grasped their magic as in passing. "
Alex Majoli - Quote: "We should think of a photographer as a Samurai who makes rituals, moves and gestures in order to develop his techniques and his instinct."
Constantine Manos - Quote: "The flow of people in a setting, their changing relationships to each other and their environment, and their constantly changing expressions and movements - all combine to create dynamic situations that provide the photographer with limitless choices of when to push the button. By choosing a precise intersection between subject and time, he may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the real into the surreal."
Peter Marlow - Quote: "Photographing news is all about being in the right place."
Steve McCurry - Quote: "What is important to my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling."
Susan Meiselas - Quote: "The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation."
Wayne Miller - Quote: "I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs."
Inge Morath - Quote: "To take pictures had become a necessity and I did not want to forgo it for anything."
Trent Parke - Quote: "The first pictures I shot were wet foot prints I'd left along a path. I just turned around and saw them and shot. It was a first picture and from that point it was the sort of thing I've photographed ever since - just things that I'm curious about, or saw, that I'm interested in...like dragon flies in a spider web."
Martin Parr - Quote: "With photography, I like to create fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist."
Paolo Pellegrin - Quote: "I'm more interested in a photography that is 'unfinished' - a photography that is suggestive and can trigger a conversation or dialogue. There are pictures that are closed, finished, to which there is no way in."
Gilles Peress - Quote:"I don't care so much anymore about 'good photography'; I am gathering evidence for history".
Gueorgui Pinkhassov - Quote: "The power of our Muse lies in her meaninglessness. Even the style can turn one into a slave if one does not run away from it, and then one is doomed to repeat oneself. The only thing that counts is curiosity. For me personally, this is what creativity is about. It will express itself less in the fear of doing the same thing over again than in the desire not to go where one has already been."
Mark Power - Quote: "Now that everyone in the developed world seems to own some form of camera, a different space has opened for documentary photographers. It's a space free from specific events, where there are different expectations, where it is first and foremost about ideas. Now we can all take pictures, with varying degrees of consistency, more than ever before it's about what we do with photography."
Raghu Rai - Quote: "A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever."
Eli Reed - Quote: "The main thing for me is that I'm happy that I've been able to work as a professional photographer. What is at the core of my work is, in essence, a mediation on being a human being."
Miguel Rio Branco - Quote: "Since the beginning, I have always relied on interbreeding. Painting meeting photography. Drawing meeting collage. Photography meeting cinema. Music meeting poetry. Poetry meeting montage. All these meetings are part of the many crossroads in the search for a comprehension and expression of myself in relation to the world."
George Rodger - Quote: "You must feel an affinity for what you are photographing. You must be part of it, and yet remain sufficiently detached to see it objectively. Like watching from the audience a play you already know by heart."
Lise Sarfati - Quote: "When using photography it is necessary to know your secret wills."
Ferdinando Scianna - Quote: "A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they does is just to open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world."
David Seymour - Quote: "'All you need,' he once said as a noted photographer orated on the psychology behind one of his pictures, 'is a little bit of luck and enough muscle to click the shutter.' He might have added: a good eye, a heart and a knowing nose for news. For all of these were obvious in his work."
(Judith Friedberg on David Seymour in "Photographic")
Marilyn Silverstone - Quote:"A photograph is a subjective impression. It is what the photographer sees. No matter how hard we try to get into the skin, into the feeling of the subject or situation, however much we empathize, it is still what we see that comes out in the images, it is our reaction to the subject and in the end, the whole corpus of our work becomes a portrait of ourselves."
Eugene Smith - Quote:"Photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes - just sometimes - one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought."
Alec Soth - Quote: "I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance."
Jacob Aue Sobol - Quote: "When I photograph, I try to use my instincts as much as possible. It is when pictures are thoughtless and irrational that they come to life; that they evolve from showing to being."
Chris Steele-Perkins - Quote: "Everything shifts as you move, and different things come into focus at different points of your life, and you try to articulate that."
Dennis Stock - Quote: "Art is a well-articulated manifestation of an aspect of life. I have been privileged to view much of life through my cameras, making the journey an enlightened experience. My emphasis has mainly been on affirmative reactions to human behavior and a strong attraction to the beauty in nature."
Mkhael Subotzky - Quote: "For me, photography has become a way of attempting to make sense of the very strange world that I see around me. I don't ever expect to achieve that understanding, but the fact that I am trying comforts me"
Larry Towell - Quote: "If there's one theme that connects all my work, I think it's that of land-lessness; how land makes people into who they are and what happens to them when they lose it and thus lose their identities."
John Vink - Quote: "Photography cannot do much. It provides some level of information, yet it has no pretensions about changing the world."
Alex Webb - Quote: "I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner."
Simon Wheatley - Quote: "The most important thing is: You don't give up. Believe in what you are doing. The moment you stop believing in a story you are doing then that story is over."
Donovan Wylie - Quote: "The idea of photography seemed to come together with the idea that this is how I could be - someone who could have one step in the world while at the same time being one step removed from it."
Patrick Zachmann - Quote: "Je suis devenu photographe parce que je n'ai pas de mémoire. La photographie me permet de reconstituer les albums de famille que je n'ai jamais eus, dont les images manquantes sont devenues le moteur de mes recherches. Mes planches-contacts sont mon journal intime."
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. - William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1950
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