photography
The savviest piece of advice I got as a rookie reporter-photographer came my first week on the job at the Exeter News-Letter in New Hampshire. The picture editor told me, “If you think you’re close, get closer.” Words to brand on your brain, maybe even your retinas, if you’re being paid to see, especially when laying bare the natural world.
“Au Naturel: Books by Ryan McGinley, Robert Longo and More,” The New York Times, June 28, 2012.
And they saw hope pass by in a train.
Description of mourners lined up along the railroad tracks, as the train carrying RFK traveled from New York City to Washington, in “April 23, 1969: R.F.K. Assassin Sirhan Sirhan Sentenced to Death,” April 23, 2012.
The negative is the score, the print is the performance.
The Eloquent Light, by Nancy Newhall (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1963), 17.
Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 84.
He began to branch out, photographing those he met through his complex social life, the infamous and the famous, from Marianne Faithfull to a young tattooed hustler. But he always returned to his muse. I no longer felt that I was the right model for him, but he would wave my objections away. He saw in me more than I could see in myself. Whenever he peeled the image from the Polaroid negative, he would say, “With you I can’t miss.”
Description of Robert Mapplethorpe, in Just Kids (New York: Ecco, 2010), 192.