By Author: J-L
Look how noble the world is, the lonely-flowing waters, the secret-keeping stones, the flowing sky . . .
-- Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), U.S. poet.
It is only a little planet but how beautiful it is. Water that owns the north and west and south and is all colors and is never quiet, and the fogs are its breath. . . All the free companies of windy grasses. . . pure naked rock. . . a lonely clearing: a little field of corn by the streamside; a roof under spared trees. Love that, not man apart from that . . .
-- Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), U.S. poet.
Writing is not about words. Painting is not about pigment. Music is not about tones. As long as photographers insist that photography is about photographs, the art is limited and self-containing!
-- Brook Jensen, U.S. photographer and editor, LightWork Quarterly, no. 18, p. 56.
Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
-- Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Austrian-born Czech author, as related in Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka.
If there is a single quality that is shared by all great men, it is vanity. But I mean by "vanity" only that they appreciate their own worth. Without this kind of vanity they would not be great. And with vanity alone, of course, a man is nothing.
-- Yousef Karsh (b. 1908), Turkish-born Canadian photographer. Cosmopolitan (New York, Dec. 1955).
I have found that great people do have in common -- an immense belief in themselves and in their mission. They also have great determination as well as an ability to work hard. At the crucial moment of decision, they draw on their accumulated wisdom. Above all, they have integrity.
-- Yousef Karsh (b. 1908), Turkish-born Canadian photographer. Parade 3 Dec 78.
I've also seen that great men are often lonely. This is understandable, because they have built such high standards for themselves that they often feel alone. But that same loneliness is part of their ability to create.
-- Yousef Karsh (b. 1908), Turkish-born Canadian photographer. Parade 3 Dec 78.
Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.
-- Yousef Karsh (b. 1908), Turkish-born Canadian photographer. Parade 3 Dec 78.
I try to photograph people's spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don't feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.
-- Yousef Karsh (b. 1908), Turkish-born Canadian photographer.
Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can.
-- Yousef Karsh (b. 1908), Turkish-born Canadian photographer
Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.
-- Yousef Karsh (b. 1908), Turkish-born Canadian photographer.
When one sees the residuum of greatness before one's camera, one must recognize it in a flash. There is a brief moment when all that there is in a man's mind and soul and spirit may be reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record. This is the elusive "moment of truth."
-- Yousef Karsh (b. 1908), Turkish-born Canadian photographer.
I think if a woman has a right to an abortion and to control her body, then she has the right to exploit her body and make money from it. We have it hard enough. Why give up one of our major assets?
-- Kathy Keeton (b. 1939), U.S. magazine publisher. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 15 (December 16, 1991). (Keeton, president of the highly risquŽ and controversial Penthouse magazine, was defending the publication of nude photographs of women.)
Me no Leica
-- Walter Kerr (1913-1996), U.S. theater critic, on John Van Druten's adaptation of I am a Camera, news summaries 31 Dec 51.
Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison d'tre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison d'tre, which lives on in itself.
-- AndrŽ Kertesz (1894-1985), Hungarian-born U.S. photographer. The Concerned Photographer, Grossman 1967.
The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything around me.
-- AndrŽ Kertesz (1894-1985), Hungarian-born U.S. photographer.
I am still hungry.
-- AndrŽ Kertesz (1894-1985), Hungarian-born U.S. photographer, when asked at age 90 why he continued to take pictures, recalled on his death, NY Times 30 Sep 85.
With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.
-- S¿ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Danish philosopher, 1854 (quoted in Sontag, p. 208).
It was like stepping into a negative rather than a photograph. I was overcome by the sudden realization of the scale of the loss.
-- Irena Klepfisz (b. 1941), U.S. author; born in Poland. "Secular Jewish Identity," 1986. Dreams of an Insomniac, part 4 (1990). On visiting Poland with her mother in 1983, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, in which her father, a Jewish rights activist, was killed. The rest of the two women's family also died in Poland during the Holocaust.
I was well acquainted with the gag that if you looked like your passport picture, you needed a trip. I was unprepared for the preponderance of thuglike pictures which I found in the course of processing passports.
-- Frances G. Knight, Director, Passport Division, U.S. State Department, ruling that it is all right to smile in passport photographs, reported in the NY Herald Tribune 21 Feb 57.
No painting can tell the truth of a single instant; no snapshot can do anything else.
-- John A. Kouwenhoven (1909-1990), U.S. author, educator. "Living in a Snapshot World," Half a Truth Is Better Than None, University of Chicago Press (1982).
It is possible to create any picture a person imagines.
-- Les Krims (Leslie Robert Krims, b. 1943), U.S. photographer.
Look, if the picture you get instantly is as beautiful as the picture you get by waiting seven days, then it is absolute madness to say that there is virtue in waiting.
-- Edwin H(erbert) Land (1909-1991), U.S. inventor and manufacturer.
Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected and must come to a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.
-- Edwin H(erbert) Land (1909-1991), U.S. inventor and manufacturer.
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
-- Edwin H(erbert) Land (1909-1991), U.S. inventor and manufacturer.
A child's self-image is more like a scrapbook than a single snapshot. As the child matures, the number and variety of images in that scrapbook may be far more important than any individual picture pasted inside it.
-- Lawrence Kutner (20th century), U.S. child psychologist and author. Parent and Child, ch. 4 (1991).
Hands off! I do not molest what I photograph, I do not meddle and I do not arrange.
-- Dorothea Lange (1895-1979), U.S. photographer.
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
-- Dorothea Lange (1895-1979), U.S. photographer.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
-- Dorothea Lange (1895-1979), U.S. photographer. Quoted in Los Angeles Times (August 13, 1978).
Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion . . . the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
-- Dorothea Lange (1895-1979), U.S. photographer.
This benefit of seeing . . . can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image . . . the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
-- Dorothea Lange (1895-1979), U.S. photographer.
But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!
-- Philip Larkin (1922-1985), British poet. From "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" (l. 16-17), in Collected Poems of Philip Larkin. Anthony Thwaite, ed. (1988) Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
-- Philip Larkin (1922-1985), British poet.From "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" (l. 2-3), in Collected Poems of Philip Larkin. Anthony Thwaite, ed. (1988) Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
. . . calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.
-- Philip Larkin (1922-1985), British poet. "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" (l. 42-45), in Collected Poems of Philip Larkin. Anthony Thwaite, ed. (1988) Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Time points the simian camera in the head
Upon confusion to be seen and seen.
-- Philip Larkin (1922-1986), British poet. "Disintegration."
It's marvellous, marvellous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I'm going to photograph everything, everything!
-- Jacques-Henri Lartigue, French photographer and painter, after taking his first photographs as a child.
Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.
-- Jacques-Henri Lartigue, French photographer and painter.
I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost -- that is important.
-- Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), French photographer and painter.
When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.
-- D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885-1930), British author. "Morality and the Novel," D.H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism (1925).
A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
-- Annie Leibowitz (b. 1949), U.S. photographer.
When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.
-- Annie Leibowitz (b. 1949), U.S. photographer.
Photographers never have much incentive to show the world as it is.
-- William Leith (b. 1960), British journalist. Independent on Sunday (London, September 13, 1992).
We used to say that inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world. One did the sets, another did the costumes. A third took the photographs. Another put the sketches in an exhibition, then into magazines, then in a book.
-- Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986), U.S. playwright and lyricist, quoted by Hugo Vickers in Cecil Beaton (Little, Brown, 1985).
A camera
makes us aware of our differences.
And our likes.
That is what is meant by communication.
. . . the language is universal.
This language.
The language of the heart.
The language of the heart when tapped
makes each of us ask the questions
which caused language to be in the first place.
who are we
where did we come from
why are we here . . .
-- Robert Leverant, U.S. photographer, Zen in the Art of Photography (Book People, Berkeley, 1968).
In other words, the single snapshot is unsatisfying to many young photographers, and thus multi-media, sequential, multiple image, and conceptual photography have developed. In these approaches snapshots are used molecularly and the possibilities of the snapshot are as vast and infinite as the Mind itself.
-- Robert Leverant, U.S. photographer, "Ontology of the snapshot," in Photography and Language. Lew Thomas, editor. San Francisco, Camerawork Press, 1976. p. 11
It is we ourselves who see an image.
We either see it or we don't.
It is as simple as this or that.
The Way lies not in the equipment.
-- (Dr.) Robert Leverant, U.S. photographer and psychotherapist, Zen in the Art of Photography (Book People, Berkeley, 1968).
All of us are watchers -- of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway -- but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.
-- Peter M. Leschak (b. 1951), U.S. firefighter and author.
[Photography] makes its images by means anybody and everybody uses for the banal purposes, just as poetry makes its structures, its indivisibilities of music and meaning, out of the same language used for utilitarian purposes, for idle chatter, or for uninspired lying. Because of this resemblance in the conditions of the two arts -- because the camera, like language, is put to constant nonartistic use, quotidian use by nonspecialists, as the painter's materials (though often misused) are not -- a poet finds, I think, a kind of simulation and confirmation in experiencing the work of photographic artists that is more specific, closer to his poetic activity, than the pleasure and love he feels in looking at paintings.
-- Denise Levertov (1923-1997), British-born U.S. poet. The Poet in the World, New Directions (1973).
Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film. They advertise memories.
-- Theodore Levitt (b. 1925), German-born U.S. marketing researcher.
My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen -- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery -- just stark me.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001), U.S. author and airplane pilot.
Light is the symbol of truth.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), U.S. author.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot, . . .
-- Robert Lowell (1917-1977), U.S. poet. "Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme" (l. 8-10), in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Alexander W. Allison and others, eds. (W. W. Norton & Company, third ed., 1983).
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