By Author: M-P
Sicily was a solid and stubborn reality thousands of years before Theocritus struck his pastoral lyre; but its most obvious quality was atmospheric. It was compacted of facts, but they were seen not as a camera sees, but as an artist sees; not in sharp outline and hard actuality, but softened by a flood of light which melts all hard lines in a landscape vibrant and shimmering. Our landscape-painters are now reporting Nature as Theocritus saw her in Sicily; the value of the overtone matching the value of the undertone, to quote an artist's phrase, "apply these tones in right proportions," writes Mr. Harrison, "and you will find that the sky painted with the perfectly matched tone will fly away indefinitely, will be bathed in a perfect atmosphere." We who have for a time lost the poetic mood and strayed from the poet's standpoint paint the undertones with entire fidelity; but we do not paint in the overtones, and the landscape loses the luminous and vibrant quality which comes into it when the sky rains light upon it. We see with the accuracy of the camera; we do not see with the vision of the poet, in which reality is not sacrificed, but subdued to larger uses. We insist on the scientific fact; the poet is intent on the visual fact. The one gives the bare structure of the landscape; the other gives us its color, atmosphere, charm. Here, perhaps, is the real difference between Cape Cod and Sicily. It is not so much a contrast between encircling seas and the sand-ridge and rock-ridge as between the two ways of seeing, the scientific and the poetic.
-- Hamilton Wright Mabieﾊ(1845-1916), U.S. writer, editor, and critic, first secretary of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; from "Theocritus on Cape Cod," in Matthews, Brander, ed.ﾊ(1852-1929),ﾊThe Oxford Book of American Essays,ﾊ1914.
He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates. . . . The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea. . . . Hot dog!
-- Norman Mailer (b. 1923), U.S. author. The Naked and the Dead, pt. 4, ch. 1, Rinehart (1948).
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
-- Norman Mailer (b. 1923), U.S. author. Newsweek (New York, October 22, 1984).
I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before.
-- Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), U.S. photographer.
I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul, and I think you have to be clear about that.
-- Mary Ellen Mark (b. 1940), U.S. photographer.
Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
-- Hans Margolius
I see no cameras! Where are the cameras?
-- Mary, Queen of Great Britain (1867-1953). As quoted in Kiss Hollywood Good-by, ch. 8, by Anita Loos (1974). The wife of King George V, who reigned 1910-1936, she allegedly said this "whenever [she] graced a public gathering" and no photographers were in evidence.
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
-- Bible, Matthew (ch. VI, v. 22).
There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.
-- Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Canadian communications theorist. Understanding Media, pt. 1, ch. 2, McGraw-Hill (1964).
One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.
-- Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. "The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors," No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985).
A handful of scholars -- mostly from fields other than communications, sociology and psychology -- have tried to call attention to the potential influences of communication technologies in addition to and apart from the content they convey. I use the singular "medium theory" to describe this research tradition in order to differentiate it from most other "media theory." Medium theory focuses on the particular characteristics of each individual medium or of each particular type of media. Broadly speaking, medium theorists ask: what are the relatively fixed features of each means of communicating and how do these features make the medium physically, psychologically and socially different from other media and from face-to-face interaction?
Medium theory examines such variables as the senses that are required to attend to the medium, whether the communication is bi-directional or uni-directional, how quickly messages can be disseminated, whether learning to encode and decode in the medium is difficult or simple, how many people can attend to the same message at the same moment, and so forth.
Medium theorists argue that such variables influence the medium's use and its social, political, and psychological impact.
-- Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic.
I'm much more interested in what reality feels like than what it looks like.
-- Duane Michals (b. 1932), U.S. photographer.
I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.
-- Duane Michals (b. 1932), U.S. photographer.
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
-- Duane Michals (b. 1932), U.S. photographer.
Tomorrow I will discover Sunset Boulevard. Eurhythmic dancing, ball-room dancing, tap dancing, artistic photography, ordinary photography, lousy photography, electro-fever treatment, internal douche treatment, ultra- violet treatment, elocution lessons, psychic readings, institutes of religion, astrological demonstrations, hands read, feet manicured, elbows massaged, faces lifted, warts removed, fat reduced, insteps raised, corsets fitted, busts vibrated, corns removed, hair dyed, glasses fitted, soda jerked, hangovers cured, headaches driven away, flatulence dissipated, limousines rented, the future made clear, the war made comprehensible, octane made higher and butane lower, drive in and get indigestion, flush the kidneys, get a cheap car-wash, stay-awake pills and go-to-sleep pills, Chinese herbs are very good for you and without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable.
-- Henry Miller (1891-1980), U.S. author. "Soir仔 in Hollywood," The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945).
The camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know.
-- Lisette Model (1901-1983), Austrian-born U.S. photographer.
I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.
-- Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Italian-born U.S. photographer and activist.
In a few days they are on the walls of the recipients, mementos of a once-in-a-lifetime visit to the president of the United States, pretty good cementers of future support.
-- Irvin Molotsky, U.S. journalist, on what White House photographer Michael Evans called "grip-and-grin" photographs of Ronald Reagan and visiting dignitaries, "Of Presidential Image and Presidential Focus," NY Times 15 Mar 85.
Why? It paid the rent.
-- Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), U.S. actor. As quoted in Ms. magazine, p. 38 (August 1972). The "sex symbol" answering why she had posed nude for a calendar photograph early in her career.
Photography will be the twentieth-century art -- and the international language.
-- Willard Morgan, U.S. photographer, editor, publisher, 1925
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
-- Toni Morrison (b. 1931), U.S. novelist, editor. Tar Baby, p. 245 (1981).
In Europe the ubiquitous GI, with his camera like a third eye, created wherever he went a little America, air-conditioned, steam-heated and neon-lighted. In American eyes he was a liberator and defender of freedom. In other eyes he often seemed part of an American army of occupation. To all he symbolized Europe's enfeeblement and the shift of world power and wealth across the Atlantic.
-- Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), British journalist and author, "The Titans: United States of America," BBC TV 16 Jan 62
Truth is a bad thing. I don't like truth. Truth is bad. It tastes bad.
-- Vik Muniz (b. 1961), Brazilian photographer, quoted in "Interview: Making It Real," ICI Newsletter, Vol. 10, no. 1, Winter 1995-96: published by Independent Curators Incorporated.
I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
-- Edward Munch (1863-1944), Norwegian artist. "Saint Cloud Declaration" (1889-1890), quoted in Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography, ch. 11 (1968).
But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out -- somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door -- a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus.
-- Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-born U.S. novelist, poet. Pale Fire, Commentary -- Note to line 1000 (1962). The end of the novel.
The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.
-- F四ix Nadar (Gaspard F四ix Tournachon, 1820-1910), French photographer.
Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.
-- Arnold Newman (b. 1918), U.S. photographer.
The subject must be thought of in terms of the 20th century, of houses he lives in and places he works, in terms of the kind of light the windows in these places let through and by which we see him every day.
-- Arnold Newman (b. 1918), U.S. photographer, One Mind's Eye (Godine 1974).
My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
-- Helmut Newton (b. 1920), German-born Australian photographer.
The romance and mystery is [sic] gone. Computer-processed images have no delicacy, no craftsmanship, no substance, and no soul. No love.
-- Kim Nibblett (b. c. 1969), U.S. photographer. As quoted in Silicon Snake Oil, ch. 6, by Clifford Stoll (1995).
If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher.
Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher, p. 187
We see things not as they are but as we are.
-- Ana不 Nin (1903-1977), French-born U.S. author.
Why is it that no photograph of a person has the depth a painted portrait can have? The two embody different quantities of time. A photograph is a ﾒsnapshot," whether or not it was posed; it shows one particular moment of time and what the person looked like right then, what his surface showed. During the extended hours a painting is sat for, though, its subject shows a range of traits, emotions, and thoughts, all revealed in differing lights. Combining different glimpses of the person, choosing an aspect here, a tightening of muscle there, a glint of light, a deepening of line, the painter interweaves these different portions of surface, never before simultaneously exhibited, to produce a fuller portrait and a deeper one. The portraitist can select one tiny aspect of everything shown at a moment to incorporate into the final painting.
-- Robert Nozick (b. 1938), U.S. philosopher, educator. The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, "Introduction," Simon & Schuster (1989).
The symmetrical piles of white bodies,
the round white breast-shapes of the heaps,
the smell of the smoke, the dogs the wires the
rope the hunger. It had happened to others.
There was a word for us. I was: a Jew.
-- Sharon Olds (b. 1942), U.S. poet. "That Year," lines 24-28 (1980). On seeing, in social studies class, photographs from Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp located in Poland, where more than one million Jews were killed during World War II.
In written communication, the imagination converts codes into a version of reality, and the mind reasons its way to judgments, convictions, and actions. With television, by contrast, movement, sound, and color rush experiences directly to the senses. The process moves from image to impression, to emotional impulse, and then to action. Sensation and emotional intensity dominate. The reflection and reasoning which verbal communication demand are bypassed. Another profound difference between television and writing is the way they collect and disseminate knowledge. Television absorbs the scenes within the range of its lenses, records the images, then diffuses them like a gas. It creates the illusion of reproducing life in its natural, multidimensional state. Languages, by contrast, convert life into artificial codes and organize them into artificial patterns.
-- Michael J. O'Neill (b. 1922), U.S. author, editor. The Roar of the Crowd: How Television and People Power Are Changing the World, ch. 2, Random House (1993).
A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.
-- Norman Parkinson (1913-1990), British fashion photographer, New Yorker 10 Dec 84
The camera can be the most deadly weapon since the assassin's bullet. Or it can be the lotion of the heart.
-- Norman Parkinson (1913-1990), British fashion photographer, New Yorker 10 Dec 84
I like to make people look as good as they'd like to look, and with luck, a shade better.
-- Norman Parkinson (1913-1990), British fashion photographer.
36 satisfactory exposures on a roll means a photographer is not trying anything new.
-- Freeman Patterson, U.S. photographer, teacher of visual design, and writer.
One must always tell what one sees. Above all, which is more difficult, one must always see what one sees.
-- Charles Peguy (1873-1914), French philosopher and poet.
A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.
-- Irving Penn (b. 1917), U.S. photographer
We take language into our minds; we read words in the same internal voice with which we think, remember, pray. But when we look at paintings or photographs, the reverse is true. If the image corresponds to our most intensely personal, yet archetypal, yearnings and memories, we don't take the image in, we move out of ourselves into the image, as though it were another world, a hologram whose forms of light are ghostly angels, or a dream whose physical reality is suggested by what we see on the surface of a canvas or a page. We connect with the image as though we had lost it within our own memories and are now surprised to find it represented outside ourselves, vital and luminous, charged with energy.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips (b. 1952), U.S. poet and novelist.
Now at least we know everything that painting isn't.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Quoted in Mario De Micheli, Scritti di Picasso (1964). Remark, 1949, in answer to whether painting figures was still possible after photography, cinema, etc., reported by artist Renato Guttuso in his journals.
I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist.
Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.
-- Eliot Porter (1901-1990), U.S. photographer. Quoted in Guardian (London, November 6, 1990).
The most advertised commodity is not always intrinsically the best, but is sometimes merely the product of a company with plenty of money to spend on advertising. In the same way, money brings certain people before the public -- sometimes they are persons of "quality," quite as often the so-called "society leaders" featured in the public press do not belong to good society at all, in spite of their many published photographs and the energies of their press-agents. Or possibly they do belong to "smart" society; but if too much advertised, instead of being the "queens" they seem, they might more accurately be classified as the court jesters of to-day.
-- Emily Post (1873-1960), U.S. writer, Etiquette, 1922. Chapter I, "What Is Best Society?"
The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.
-- Neil Postman, U.S. social critic, educator. "The Peek-a-Boo World," in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Viking (1985).
Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist. "Within a Budding Grove: Seascape, with Frieze of Girls," vol. 4, pt. 2, Remembrance of Things Past (1918), trans. by Scott Moncrieff (1924).
The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.
-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist.
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