“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.”
Dana Jennings
more infosource: “Au Naturel: Books by Ryan McGinley, Robert Longo and More,” New York Times, June 28, 2012.
category: advice, perspective, photography, see
medium: Book review
“And they saw hope pass by in a train.”
Paul Fusco
more infosource: 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. Stunning slideshow of photographs here. (Thanks, DW!)
category: death, funeral, hope, photography, politics, Robert F. Kennedy, train
medium: Newspaper article
“The negative is the score, the print is the performance.”
Ansel Adams
more infosource: The Eloquent Light, by Nancy Newhall (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1963), 17.
category: art, creative process, photography
medium: art monograph
“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.”
Eudora Welty
more infosource: One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 84.
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category: documentation, photography, snapshot, time
medium: Memoir
“The photographs . . . were harvested on one trip round London. The things they show have very little to do with Design, apart from achieving its object. They show what weather, wit, accident, lack of judgment, bad taste, bad spelling, necessity, and good loud repetition can do to put a sort of music into the streets where we walk.”
Robert Brownjohn
more info“These new cameras make images that are so sharp, so crisp. I think hyper-realism can only exist in contrast to a kind of realism that is fairly flawed. When everything is hyper there is no hyper.”
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
more infosource: “Q & A: Philip-Lorca diCorcia,” by Cathy Horyn, The New York Times, February 11, 2011.
category: art, digital, photography, realism, technology
medium: Interview
“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.'”
Patti Smith
more infosource: description of Robert Mapplethorpe, in Just Kids (New York: Ecco, 2010), 192.
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category: art, love, muse, photography, Polaroid
medium: memoir
“Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”
Paul Simon
more infosource: from his song “Kodachrome,” quoted in “For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas,” by A. G. Sulzberger, The New York Times, December 29, 2010.
category: film, kodachrome, photography
medium: newspaper article
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