“
I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.
”
”
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
“
We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.
”
”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
“
In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.
”
”
W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz)
“
If this story was a stack of photographs—the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country— it would start with Vivek’s father, Chika. The first print would be of him riding a bus to the village to visit his mother; it would show him dangling an arm out of the window, feeling the air push against his face and the breeze entering his smile.
”
”
Akwaeke Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji)
“
[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60 year old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.
”
”
Dalma Heyn
“
It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence
”
”
George Orwell (1984)
“
I need to leave something behind. Something that will stay. This room should be a historical landmark, the site of the beginning and end of Colby and Bev. Several minutes have passed, and I know that if I wait too long there will be a knock on the door and I'll have to go, but I need to leave a mark. It has to be significant enough to last, but subtle enough that the maid won't notice and wash it away.
As I'm looking around I realize that I never noticed the print above the bed. It's another in the family series - a faded wedding portrait. Groom in tux. Bride with pearls. It comes off the wall easily.I set the print on the bedspread and wit eht dust on the wall with the sleeve of my hood. I take out a Sharpie from my bag. The wall has yellowed to create a perfect rectangle where the photograph must have been hanging, unremoved, for years.
I fill the whiter space with this: I never got to tell you how beautiful you are.
And then I return the frame to its place on the wall and go back out into the night.
”
”
Nina LaCour (The Disenchantments)
“
C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute.
”
”
Robert Adams
“
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.
”
”
Charles Bukowski
“
Page thirteen of the Baudelaire file was not a crowded sheet of paper - there was just one photography and a sentence to make an author cry himself to sleep even years after the photograph was taken, or to make three siblings sit and stare at a page for a long time, as if an entire book were printed on one sheet of paper.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The Hostile Hospital (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #8))
“
Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. The writer has time to reflect. He can accept and reject, accept again; and before committing his thoughts to paper he is able to tie the several relevant elements together. There is also a period when his brain "forgets," and his subconscious works on classifying his thoughts. But for photographers, what has gone is gone forever.
”
”
Henri Cartier-Bresson (The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers)
“
Many times someone giving you advice is just trying to convince themselves of said advice, this is my advice to you and me." - Vic Stah Milien
”
”
Vic Stah Milien
“
Page 3 is a crazy concept whereby for no discernable reason, a national newspaper prints a photograph of a young woman showing her tits. I'd object but I'm too enamoured with the boobs...
”
”
Russell Brand (My Booky Wook)
“
It was an irresistible development of modern illustration (so largely photographic) that borders should be abandoned and the "picture" end only with the paper. This method may be suitable for for photographs; but it is altogether inappropriate for the pictures that illustrate or are inspired by fairy-stories. An enchanted forest requires a margin, even an elaborate border. To print it coterminous with the page, like a "shot" of the Rockies in Picture Post, as if it were indeed a "snap" of fairyland or a "sketch by our artist on the spot", is a folly and an abuse.
”
”
J.R.R. Tolkien (Tolkien On Fairy-stories)
“
My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. Whenever I’d permit, Or, with a silent shiver, order it, Whatever in my field of vision dwelt – An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte Stilettos of a frozen stillicide – Was printed on my eyelids’ nether side Where it would tarry for an hour or two, And while this lasted all I had to do Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire (Penguin Modern Classics))
“
Some photographers could vomit on a piece of paper and call it art, you know... Hang it in the Guggenheim, or whatever. Sell a print for two hundred pounds? But I can't do that. I just-- Maybe I have too much respect for walls... or something.
”
”
Pansy Schneider-Horst
“
I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer's shop and a blacksmith's and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith - or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse - passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer's shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph - sixty minutes - was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock.
I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away.
”
”
Penelope Lively (Moon Tiger)
“
For Mia, however, the photographs were only a vague approximation of what she wanted to express, and she soon found herself not only altering the prints – with everything from ballpoint pen to splashes of laundry detergent – but experimenting with the camera itself, bending its limited range to her desires.
”
”
Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere)
“
She realized that the photograph had caused his reaction. It came to her almost as a revelation. Think of it: a photographer presses a button. A few hours later and half a world away, some dots of ink on a news print showed what he had seen-and had the power to touch peoples emotions, perhaps to change their way of thinking.
”
”
Soheir Khashoggi (Nadia's Song)
“
We observe few objects really closely. As we walk on the earth, we observe the external events at two or three arms' lengths. If we ride a horse or drive in an automobile, we are further separated from the immediate surround. We see and photograph "scenery"; our vast world is inadequately described as the "landscape." The most intimate object perceived daily is usually the printed page. The small and commonplace are rarely explored.
”
”
Ansel Adams (Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs)
“
Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress’s dead ends. It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions. That’s why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light.
”
”
Nicholas Carr (What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains)
“
The difference between Before and After is that today we need to safeguard our inner weirdo, seal it off and protect it from being buffeted. Learn an old torch song that nobody knows; read a musty, out-of-print detective novel; photograph a honey-perfect sunset and show it to no one. We may need to build new and stronger weirdo cocoons, in which to entertain our private selves. Beyond the sharing, the commenting, the constant thumbs-upping, beyond all that distracting gilt, there are stranger things waiting to be loved.
”
”
Michael Harris (Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World)
“
Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interpets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks-none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial compostion; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details.
”
”
Isabel Allende (Portrait in Sepia)
“
Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you.
”
”
Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)
“
The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter—here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations.
”
”
Charles de Lint (The Very Best of Charles de Lint)
“
For my mother’s fifty-eighth birthday I had all her emails from India printed into a book, along with the beautiful photographs she had taken on her journey.
”
”
Anna Marie Tendler (Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir)
“
The theory arrived neither full-blown, like an orphan on the doorstep, nor sharply defined, like a spike through a shoe; nor did it develop as would a photographic print, crisp images gradually emerging from a shadowy soup. Rather, it unwound like a turban, like a mummy bandage; started with the sudden loosening of a clasp, a scarab fastener, and then unraveled in awkward spirals from end to frazzled end.
”
”
Tom Robbins
“
Just days after the alleged rape, Florida newspapers were calling for capital punishment of the Groveland Boys. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)
”
”
Gilbert King (Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America)
“
Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you. She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of. It
”
”
Lauren Groff (Arcadia)
“
Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were:
‘We shall march prospering, not thro’ his presence;
Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,’ and
‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’
There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph!
”
”
Bipan Chandra (India's Struggle for Independence)
“
That dusty, musty theater smell, how it still haunts each one of us in turn, and Maria at least will never shake it free. That swing door with the bar across it, the cold passage, those hollow-sounding stairs and the descent to the abyss. Those notices upon the walls that no one ever reads, that prowling cat with tail erect which mews and vanishes, the rusty fire-bucket into which someone throws the stub of a cigarette. The first sight of it would always be the same, no matter in what city or what country. The posters, sometimes black-printed, sometimes red, with Pappy’s and Mama’s names upon them, and the photographs, always of Mama, never of Pappy—this was a superstition of them both—hanging by the entrance.
”
”
Daphne du Maurier (The Parasites)
“
TED” HAD SURFACED, allowed himself to be seen in broad daylight, and approached at least a half dozen young women, beyond the missing pair. He’d given his name. His true name? Probably not, but for the media who pounced on the incredible disappearances it was something to headline. Ted. Ted. Ted. Indeed, the dogged pursuit of reporters seeking something new to write was going to interfere mightily with the police investigation. The frantic families of the missing girls from Lake Sammamish were besieged by some of the most coercive tactics any reporter can use. When families declined to be interviewed, there were some reporters who hinted that they might have to print unsavory rumors about Janice and Denise unless they could have interviews, or that, even worse, families’ failure to tell of their exquisite pain in detail might mean a lessening of publicity needed to find their daughters. It was ugly and cruel, but it worked. The grieving parents allowed themselves to be photographed and gave painful interviews.
”
”
Ann Rule (The Stranger Beside Me)
“
It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering. There's supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop's: the only printed credit that might apply to him is "Harmonica, kazoo—a friend." But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea. . . .)
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
“
Group f.64 believed that photographic beauty was defined by beautiful prints produced by purely photographic means. The subjects need not be beautiful. What might appear ugly or commonplace could have value through the respectful understanding and expression of the photographer.
”
”
Mary Street Alinder (Group f.64: Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and the Community of Artists Who Revolutionized American Photography)
“
And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?
”
”
Sylvia Brownrigg (Pages for You (Pages for You, #1))
“
You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I fell for you instantly, the second I saw those unique eyes of yours in the back of your book. A piece of paper with a printed photograph on it―that was all it took. Then it was your words, your ability to make me feel, just by the way you write.
”
”
Dolores Lane (Bloody Fingers & Red Lipstick)
“
This prolific and inventive photographer (Edward Steichen) must be given credit for virtually inventing modern fashion photography, and as the tohousands of high-quality original prints in the Conde Nast archives prove, only Irving Penn and Richard Avedon have since emerged as serious historical rivals.
”
”
William A. Ewing
“
If you do not know me, you whose presence is not even essential to me, it can only mean that this calendar has been badly printed. Your photographs on my walls and the bitter memories that our meetings have impressed upon my heart have only a paltry role in my love! You figure large in my dreams, ever-present, alone on the stage yet destitute of any role.
I encounter you rarely on my path. I am of an age when one begins to contemplate one's emaciated fingers, and at which youth is so full, so real that it cannot be long before it begins to fade. Your lips bring tears to my eyes; you sleep naked in my brain and I dare not rest.
”
”
Louis Aragon (Paris Peasant)
“
A photograph prints from the negative only while exposed to the sun. While the artist is looking to see how it is getting on he simply stops the getting on. Whatever of wise supervision the soul may need, it is certain it can never be over-exposed, or that, being exposed, anything else in the world can improve the result or quicken it.
”
”
Henry Drummond (Beautiful Thoughts)
“
At every instant the objects and events in the world around us bombard us with impressions. As they do so they produce a phantasia, a mental impression. From this the mind generates a perception (hypolepsis), which might best be compared to a print made from a photographic negative. Ideally this print will be an accurate and faithful representation of the original. But it may not be. It may be blurred, or it may include shadow images that distort or obscure the original. Chief among these are inappropriate value judgments: the designation as “good” or “evil” of things that in fact are neither good nor evil. For example, my impression that my house has just burned down is simply that—an impression or report conveyed to me by my senses about an event in the outside world. By contrast, my perception that my house has burned down and I have thereby suffered a terrible tragedy includes not only an impression, but also an interpretation imposed upon that initial impression by my powers of hypolepsis. It is by no means the only possible interpretation, and I am not obliged to accept it. I may be a good deal better off if I decline to do so. It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience. Lenses enlarge the sight, omit its context, and make of it a pretty and sensible picture, like something on a Christmas card. I assure you, if you send any shepherds a Christmas card on which is printed a three-by-three photograph of the angel of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, and a multitude of the heavenly host, they will not be sore afraid. More fearsome things can come in envelopes. More moving photographs than those of the sun’s corona can appear in magazines. But I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky.
”
”
Annie Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters)
“
The pictorial paper kept to its word and printed a piece on “Nurseries for Women Workers” and included the photograph Bunty had taken of Anne bending down to adjust Ruby’s crown. Bunts had captured the moment when Anne was caring for her little girl while still pushing Tony in his pram. You could clearly see the sign saying MY MUMMY WANTS TO HELP WIN THE WAR.
”
”
A.J. Pearce (Yours Cheerfully (The Emmeline Lake Chronicles #2))
“
This Is a Photograph of Me
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the centre
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion
but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)
”
”
Margaret Atwood (Circle Game)
“
Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you. She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of.
”
”
Lauren Groff (Arcadia)
“
I've always found old bookstores exciting. Whenever I'm in a city that's new to me, I immedicately look through the telephone directory for BOOKS, USED AND RARE. Book dealers send me their catalogs, and I read them as carefully as I would a letter from an old friend, never knowing what treasure I might find. Sometimes the catalogs contain printed material other than books, such as old photographs, newspapers, pamphlets, postcards, and letters.
”
”
Walter Dean Myers (At Her Majesty's Request: An African Princess in Victorian England)
“
We sleep and nap in bed--my two piled up mattresses on the bare wooden floor. We are silent, dreamy. She surveys my photographs crowded on the wall. I have no particular subject, no special theme. The Brooklyn Bridge at dawn will do, tugs and their milky wake, elms fading in the fading light, my postman and his green mailbag. It's the shooting the excites me. Printing is the fatiguing task after the action, the dressing of the game after the hunt.
”
”
Frederic Tuten (Van Gogh's Bad Café)
“
In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.
I never knew I was there, either.
For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.
”
”
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“
There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print.
Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day.
”
”
Nora Raleigh Baskin (Subway Love)
“
I am a firm believer that digital imaging has already rivaled the chemical process in its ability to make fine prints. An exceptional digital print, on a fine quality paper, can take on all the delicacy of a masterful photogravure. Each is, after all, ink on paper. The unfortunate thing is that skillful digital fine art photography is being created by so few, and today’s artworld is brimming with hastily made, conceptually oriented, digital bric-a-brac.
”
”
Waswo X. Waswo (India Poems: The Photographs)
“
At every instant the objects and events in the world around us bombard us with impressions. As they do so they produce a phantasia, a mental impression. From this the mind generates a perception (hypolepsis), which might best be compared to a print made from a photographic negative. Ideally this print will be an accurate and faithful representation of the original. But it may not be. It may be blurred, or it may include shadow images that distort or obscure the original.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.
This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.
The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.'
The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it.
The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window.
The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.
And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street.
That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer.
Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.
”
”
Nicole Krauss
“
Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite variation and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned by experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated … has found itself, often simply on account of our anxiety, immediately hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word, which we ourselves have forgotten, or else a word never uttered by us but formed on its course by the imperfect refraction of a different word, can be transported without ever halting for any obstacle to infinite distances … and succeed in diverting at our expense the banquet of the gods. What we actually recall of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies to provoke hilarity even in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and behavior is no more like that which we form of them ourselves, than is like an original drawing a spoiled copy in which, at one point, for a black line, we find an empty gap, and for a blank space an unaccountable contour. It may be, all the same, that what has not been transcribed is some non-existent feature, which we behold, merely in our purblind self-esteem, and that what seems to us added is indeed a part of ourselves, but so essential a part as to have escaped our notice. So that this strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to ourselves bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, scarcely flattering, indeed, but profound and useful, as a photograph taken by X-rays. Not that that is any reason why we should recognize ourselves in it. A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you show him their radiograph, will have, face to face with that rosary of bones, labeled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: “Dromedary resting.” Later on, this discrepancy between our portraits, according as it was our own hand that drew them or another, I was to register in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of a collection of photographs which they themselves had taken while round about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a rule, but plunging them in stupor if an accident were to reveal them with the warning: “This is you.
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way)
“
For Albertine’s death to have suppressed my suffering, the mortal blow would have had to kill her not only in Touraine, but within me. There, she had never been more alive. To enter inside us, people have been obliged to take on the form and to fit into the framework of time; appearing to us only in successive instants, they have never managed to reveal to us more than one aspect, print more than a single photograph of themselves at a time. This is no doubt a great weakness in human beings, to consist in a simple collection of moments; yet a great strength too; they depend on memory, and our memory of a moment is not informed of everything that has happened since, the moment which it registered still lives on and, with it, the person whose form was sketched within it. And then this fragmentation not only makes the dead person live on, it multiplies her forms. In order to console myself, I would have had to forget not one but innumerable Albertines. When I had succeeded in accepting the grief of having lost one of them, I would have to begin again with another, with a hundred others.
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition))
“
It is, incidentally, a favour that e-books have done for the Good Bookshop: they have made books beautiful again. A few years ago, book covers could be rather drab affairs: the title and the author's name printed over a stock photograph of something Vaguely Relevant. If you wanted to read it, you had to take it as it was. Whereas now, in these new and glorious days when the margins on physical are that little bit higher than on the electrical alternative, publishers produce exquisite bindings. Bookshops haven't been this pretty for at least a century.
”
”
Mark Forsyth (The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted)
“
Other people used photographs as a way to keep close to the events of their lives; she had used them as a way to stand apart. She had never looked at the Kitchen Counter series and remembered the days before and after, the grocery shopping or the leftovers in the refrigerator, didn't look at the photographs of Ben's action figures or even the plateau of his baby back and think of which toys he'd preferred or when those faint dimples at the base of his spine had given way to the firmer flesh of childhood. She'd denatured parts of her own existence by printing and framing and freezing them.
”
”
Anna Quindlen (Still Life with Bread Crumbs)
“
A photograph develops in a tray of liquid. Previously it’s been just a blank sheet of printing paper shut up in a lightproof envelope; now it has a function, an image, a certainty. We slide the photo quickly into the tray of fixer to secure that clear, vulnerable moment, to make the image harder, unchippable, solid for at least a few years. But what if you plunge it into the fixer and the chemical doesn’t work? This progress, this amorous motion you feel, might refuse to stabilize. Have you seen a picture go on relentlessly developing until its whole surface is black, its celebratory moment obliterated?
”
”
Julian Barnes (A History of the World in 10½ Chapters)
“
But any picture could deal with the problem of light. The problem with this picture is greater than that of reflective surfaces - it's one of death. You invite a profound theme into your work when you choose cut flowers. You are talking about mortality and time moving forward. You are saying that everything, everything we see and experience and love happens uniquely and happens only once. When you take a picture of a flower in a glass you are, paradoxically, capturing evanescence. You are also showing the indifference of Nature. There is no mourning in a flower photograph, only a shrugging of the shoulders.
”
”
Whitney Otto (Eight Girls Taking Pictures (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series))
“
The café smelled—not unpleasantly—of grease and beans and frying meat. Neil Diamond was on the jukebox, singing “I Am, I Said” in Spanish. The specials (which weren’t very) were posted behind the counter. Above the kitchen pass-through was a defaced photograph of Donald Trump. His blond hair had been colored black; he had been given a forelock and a mustache. Below it someone had printed Yanqui vete a casa: Yankee go home. At first Ralph was surprised—Texas was a red state, after all, as red as they came—but then he remembered that if whites weren’t the actual minority this near to the border, it was a close-run thing.
”
”
Stephen King (The Outsider)
“
If you do not know me, you whose presence is not even essential to me, it can only mean that this calendar has been badly printed. Your photographs on my walls and the bitter memories that our meetings have impressed upon my heart have only a paltry role in my love! You figure large in my dreams, ever-present, alone on the stage yet destitute of any role.
I encounter you rarely on my path. I am of an age when one begins to contemplate one's emaciated fingers, and at which youth is so full, so real that it cannot be long before it begins to fade. Your lips bring tears to my eyes; you sleep naked in my brain and I dare not rest.
”
”
Robert Desnos (Liberty or Love!)
“
Well, I’ll tell you. You know this new photographic process they’ve invented? It’s called Pathé. It makes everything seem lifelike. The hues and coloration are magnificent. Well, then, what I would do, if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I’d build them cabins in Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all the film they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs in every season. I want you to capture all the colors, all the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that.’ And then I’d leave them be. And in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated by Pathé. And then I would print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I would urge every magazine in the country to print them and tell every gallery and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then,” Mulholland said slowly, with what Albright remembered as a vulpine grin, “and then do you know what I would do? I’d go in there and build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and stop the goddamned waste!
”
”
Marc Reisner (Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water)
“
He hefts it out and sees that it is marked only with his name, and slowly opens it.
Inside it is everything: every letter he had ever written Willem, every substantial e-mail printed out. There are birthday cards he'd given Willem. There are photographs of him, some of which he has never seen. There is the Artforum issue with 'Jude with Cigarette' on the cover. There is a card from Harold, written shortly after the adoption, thanking Willem for coming and for the gift. There is an article about him winning a prize in law school, which he certainly hadn't send Willem but someone clearly had. He hadn't needed to catalog his life after all - Willem had been doing it for him all along.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
At the American cemetery in Henri-Chapelle, fifteen miles east of Liège, grave diggers with backhoes worked around the clock to bury as many as five hundred GIs a day. Each was interred in a hole five feet deep, two feet wide, and six and a half feet long, but only after their overshoes had been removed for reuse. One dog tag was placed in the dead man’s mouth, the other tacked to a cross or a Star of David atop the grave. Those whose tags had been lost first went to a morgue tent for photographs and dental charting. Fingertips were cleaned and injected with fluid to enhance prints, while technicians searched for laundry marks, tattoos, and other identifying clues, all to avoid conceding that here was yet another mother’s son known but to God.
”
”
Rick Atkinson (The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy))
“
I didn't tell Papa that Petrona was raped.
I didn't tell Cassandra I had written to Petrona and that she had written back.
I didn't correct Mama when she assumed the photograph Petrona had sent was a new photograph. I didn't tell her it was actually printed the year we fled Colombia.
I didn't tell Mama that the man in the photograph was Gorrion.
I was the only one with all the pieces. I was the only one that knew that Petrona had made a home with a man who had betrayed her, that she had chosen to keep the baby, that this new life she had fed from her breasts was something I had to make up to her and the only thing I could do was keep silent about what I knew. After all, who am I to judge? As her photo blurred, I thought: even oblivion is a kindness.
”
”
Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Fruit of the Drunken Tree)
“
the earliest surreal photographs come from the 1850s, when photographers first went out prowling the streets of London, Paris, and New York, looking for their unposed slice of life. These photographs, concrete, particular, anecdotal (except that the anecdote has been effaced)—moments of lost time, of vanished customs—seem far more surreal to us now than any photograph rendered abstract and poetic by superimposition, under-printing, solarization, and the like. Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless as well as universal, the Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious—time itself. What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class.
”
”
Susan Sontag (On Photography)
“
As he drones on, I examine one of the books. It has that pleasant
smell of newly-printed paper and, like all modern textbooks, is a
masterpiece of political correctness. It is chock-full of bright
pictures of children from ethnic minority backgrounds doing science
experiments and photographs of every kind of phenomena. Even the
teachers are in wheelchairs. Any wrongdoing is illustrated by a white
boy; here is one, foolishly sticking his fork into an electrical socket
and being electrocuted. Here’s another, drinking from a test tube.
What I cannot find, to my mounting horror as I flip through the
book, are any questions.
Oh, bloody hell!Why are all modern textbooks in every subject full of
photographs but devoid of questions?
I also notice that, actually, it doesn’t quite seem to cover the
syllabus to which we have recently changed after the head of
department assured us that it was ‘the easiest one yet’.
”
”
Frank Chalk (It's Your Time You're Wasting)
“
An example: A few years ago, the public health authorities in Canada, where it had been estimated that smoking kills forty-five thousand people a year, decided to supplement the warning printed on every pack of cigarettes with a shock-photograph—of cancerous lungs, or a stroke-clotted brain, or a damaged heart, or a bloody mouth in acute periodontal distress. A pack with such a picture accompanying the warning about the deleterious effects of smoking would be sixty times more likely to inspire smokers to quit, a research study had somehow calculated, than a pack with only the verbal warning. Let’s assume this is true. But one might wonder, for how long? Does shock have term limits? Right now the smokers of Canada are recoiling in disgust, if they do look at these pictures. Will those still smoking five years from now still be upset? Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting—in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.
”
”
Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others)
“
p.cm. Includes indexes.ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-6278-7 (soft cover) ISBN-10: 0-7360-6278-5 (soft cover) 1. Hatha yoga.2. Human anatomy.I.Title.RA781.7. K356 2007 613.7’046--dc22 2007010050 ISBN-10: 0-7360-6278-5 (print) ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-6278-7 (print) ISBN-10: 0-7360-8218-2 (Adobe PDF) ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-8218-1 (Adobe PDF) Copyright © 2007 by The Breathe Trust All rights reserved. Except for use in a review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, and in any information storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. Acquisitions Editor: Martin Barnard Developmental Editor: Leigh Keylock Assistant Editor: Christine Horger Copyeditor: Patsy Fortney Proofreader: Kathy Bennett Graphic Designer: Fred Starbird Graphic Artist: Tara Welsch Original Cover Designer: Lydia Mann Cover Revisions: Keith Blomberg Art Manager: Kelly Hendren Project Photographer: Lydia Mann Illustrator (cover and interior): Sharon Ellis Printer: United Graphics Human Kinetics books are available at special discounts for bulk purchase. Special editions or book excerpts
”
”
Anonymous
“
Public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory. It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents of the United States would not have been recognized had they passed the average citizen in the street. This would have been the case as well of the great lawyers, ministers and scientists of that era. To think about those men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge as codified in the printed word. You may get some sense of how we are separated from this kind of consciousness by thinking about any of our recent presidents; or even preachers, lawyers and scientists who are or who have recently been public figures. Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely a face on a television screen (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture. It is also the difference between living in a culture that provides little opportunity for leisure, and one that provides much.
”
”
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
“
Due to his unique position at the Met, John had access to the vaults that housed the museum’s entire photography collection, much of it never seen by the public. John’s specialty was Victorian photography, which he knew I was partial to as well. He invited Robert and me to come and see the work firsthand. There were flat files from floor to ceiling, metal shelves and drawers containing vintage prints of the early masters of photography: Fox Talbot, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Thomas Eakins. Being allowed to lift the tissues from these photographs, actually touch them and get a sense of the paper and the hand of the artist, made an enormous impact on Robert. He studied them intently—the paper, the process, the composition, and the intensity of the blacks. “It’s really all about light,” he said. John saved the most breathtaking images for last. One by one, he shared photographs forbidden to the public, including Stieglitz’s exquisite nudes of Georgia O’Keeffe. Taken at the height of their relationship, they revealed in their intimacy a mutual intelligence and O’Keeffe’s masculine beauty. As Robert concentrated on technical aspects, I focused on Georgia O’Keeffe as she related to Stieglitz, without artifice. Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.
”
”
Patti Smith (Just Kids)
“
A flower clock?"
"Yeah. Mum was... is a florist, so I'm using her books on flowers to try to re-create or, well, create Carl Linnaeus's flower clock. He was a guy from the eighteenth century. Basically, each flower in the clock opens at a different time of day."
"Its petals open?"
"Yeah, so flowers have circadian rhythms," Ben says. He's blushing. "I don't know. Sounds stupid now I'm saying it. And it hasn't actually worked yet either. I thought, though, that with climate change and everything, the flowers will start opening at weird times, so it kind of goes beyond everything with, you know... my mum. It'll be, like, the more we damage the world, the more we damage the clock, and time, and, yeah, the future."
"That sounds beautiful, Ben," I say.
"Yeah, I don't know. I mean, what am I going to do with it? What's the point of it, really? Will it go in a gallery and then be, like, sold as prints of photographs of it or something? And then the time element of it will be gone."
"Hmm."
"Sorry," Ben says, and he shakes his head. "I guess I'm in a bit of a crap mood." He looks at me sideways, and nervously laughs to himself. "I mean, I don't know why I just told you all that."
I shake my head. "It's fine. So, what flower's time is it now?" I ask.
Ben looks at his phone. "Ugh, yeah, so that's the other thing. There actually doesn't seem to be a flower for each hour, which is kind of problematic. But the closest to now is the meadow goat's beard. It opens at three."
"Oh, cool," I say. "So right now doesn't exist in flower time?"
"Yeah, I guess it doesn't. I've never thought of it like that.
”
”
Claire Kohda (Woman, Eating)
“
freeze, so she opted for pants with a thick, nubbly sweater that added substance to her frame. As always, her necklace was in place, and she donned a lovely bright cashmere scarf to keep her neck warm. When she stepped back to appraise herself in the mirror, she felt she looked almost as good as she had before chemotherapy started. Collecting her purse, she took a couple more pills—the pain wasn’t as bad as yesterday, but no reason to risk it—and called an Uber. Pulling up to the gallery a few minutes after closing time, she saw Mark through the window, discussing one of her photographs with a couple in their fifties. Mark offered the slightest of waves when Maggie stepped inside and hurried to her office. On her desk was a small stack of mail; she was quickly sorting through it when Mark suddenly tapped on her open door. “Hey, sorry. I thought they’d make a decision before you arrived, but they had a lot of questions.” “And?” “They bought two of your prints.” Amazing, she thought. Early in the life of the gallery, weeks could go by without the sale of even a single print of hers. And while the sales did increase with the growth of her career, the real renown came with her Cancer Videos. Fame did indeed change everything, even if the fame was for a reason she wouldn’t wish upon anyone. Mark walked into the office before suddenly pulling up short. “Wow,” he said. “You look fantastic.” “I’m trying.” “How do you feel?” “I’ve been more tired than usual, so I’ve been sleeping a lot.” “Are you sure you’re still up for this?” She could see the worry in his expression. “It’s Luanne’s gift, so I have to go. And besides, it’ll help me get into the Christmas spirit.
”
”
Nicholas Sparks (The Wish)
“
The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.
”
”
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
“
Well, there really isn’t too much to tell. First I started not to ride the bus because I wasn’t feeling well, however, after leaving the drug store and getting some medicine, a bus came along which was almost empty, so I took it rather than a cab. After the bus had gone a couple of blocks, it became full, then these white people got on. I only noticed them though, when the motorman said, “Alright, let me have those seats!” The two persons across from me moved and the man sitting with me … The motorman then said, “Didn’t you hear me? I said, let me have those seats!” I then told him that I was not going to move because I got on first and paid the same fare, and I didn’t think it was right for me to have to stand so someone else who got on later could sit down. I made up my mind that I was not going to move even if there were seats in back. I was tired of being humiliated. The bus driver then went on for another block to the circle downtown. The circle in downtown Montgomery was once the center of the city’s slave trade. Parks continued: There he stopped and called the police. When they came, they asked me why I didn’t move back, and I told them the same thing I told the motorman. Then they talked to the driver secretly, however, I did hear one say “NAACP,” and “Are you sure you want to press charges.” The driver said that he did, and that he would come down after his next trip. The policemen were reluctant, but they had no choice. When we got to the jail and the charges were made, I was photographed and finger-printed. I then started to one of the fountains to get some water, but was told that I could not drink from the fountain, so a policeman got the water in a glass for me. After this, I called my husband and told him I was in jail and that my bond would be $100. He and my mother were horrified, after explaining why I was there, they sort of calmed down a bit, and I finally got home.
”
”
Jonathan Eig (King: A Life)
“
He and Powell would be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary a few days later, and he admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her as she deserved. “I’m very lucky, because you just don’t know what you’re getting into when you get married,” he said. “You have an intuitive feeling about things. I couldn’t have done better, because not only is Laurene smart and beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a moment he teared up. He talked about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but said he ended up in the right place. He also reflected on how selfish and demanding he could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with me being sick,” he said. “I know that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.”
Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or birthdays. But in this case, he decided to plan a surprise. They had gotten married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, and he decided to take Powell back there on their anniversary. But when Jobs called, the place was fully booked. So he had the hotel approach the people who had reserved the suite where he and Powell had stayed and ask if they would relinquish it. “I offered to pay for another weekend,” Jobs recalled, “and the man was very nice and said, ‘Twenty years, please take it, it’s yours.’”
He found the photographs of the wedding, taken by a friend, and had large prints made on thick paper boards and placed in an elegant box. Scrolling through his iPhone, he found the note that he had composed to be included in the box and read it aloud:
"We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground."
By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed himself, he noted that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his kids. “I thought they might like to see that I was young once.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
Your womb can’t never bear fruit.”
Miss Ethel Fordham told her that. Without sorrow or alarm, she had passed along the news as though she’d examined a Burpee seedling overcome by marauding rabbits. Cee didn’t know then what to feel about that news, no more than what she felt about Dr. Beau. Anger wasn’t available to her—she had been so stupid, so eager to please. As usual she blamed being dumb on her lack of schooling, but that excuse fell apart the second she thought about the skilled women who had cared for her, healed her. Some of them had to have Bible verses read to them because they could not decipher print themselves, so they had sharpened the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen senses of smell and hearing. And they knew how to repair what an educated bandit doctor had plundered. If not schooling, then what?
Branded early as an unlovable, barely tolerated “gutter
child” by Lenore, the only one whose opinion mattered to her parents, exactly like what Miss Ethel said, she had agreed with the label and believed herself worthless. Ida never said, “You my child. I dote on you. You wasn’t born in no gutter. You born into my arms. Come on over here and let me give you a hug.” If not her mother, somebody somewhere should have said those words and meant them.
Frank alone valued her. While his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her. Should it have? Why was that his job and not her own? Cee didn’t know any soft, silly women. Not Thelma, or Sarah, or Ida, and certainly not the women who had healed her. Even Mrs. K., who let the boys play nasty with her, did hair and slapped anybody who messed with her, in or outside her hairdressing kitchen.
So it was just herself. In this world with these people she wanted to be the person who would never again need rescue. Not from Lenore through the lies of the Rat, not from Dr. Beau through the courage of Sarah and her brother. Sun-smacked or not, she wanted to be the one who rescued her own self. Did she have a mind, or not? Wishing would not make it so, nor would blame, but thinking might. If she did not respect herself, why should anybody else?
Okay. She would never have children to care about and give her the status of motherhood.
Okay. She didn’t have and probably would never have a mate. Why should that matter? Love? Please. Protection? Yeah, sure. Golden eggs? Don’t make me laugh.
Okay. She was penniless. But not for long. She would have to invent a way to earn a living.
What else?
”
”
Toni Morrison (Home)
“
The individual home page, of which there must now be millions, is an act of self-expression and self-promotion that recalls several earlier forms, including the greeting card, the resume, and the photograph album.
”
”
Jay David Bolter (Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print)
“
He shivered. A picture appeared in his mind’s eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the Party. They sat at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees; bearded and earnest, they gazed into the photographer’s lens. Above each head was a small circle, enclosing a number corresponding to a name printed underneath. All were solemn, only the old man who was presiding had a sly and amused look in his slit Tartar eyes. Rubashov sat second to his right, with his pince-nez on his nose. No. 1 sat somewhere at the lower end of the table, four square and heavy. They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels. They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. All their thoughts became deeds and all their dreams were fulfilled. Where were they? Their brains, which had changed the course of the world, had each received a charge of lead. Some in the forehead, some in the back of the neck. Only two or three of them were left over, scattered throughout the world, worn out. And himself; and No. 1.
”
”
Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon)
“
People don’t write on the backs of photos much anymore. That’s because we don’t write on anything as much as we used to—at least, not in a traditional, pen-to-paper sense. Nor do we even take photos—by which I mean real photos, printed on paper coated with photo emulsion. Cameras have proliferated as never before, but the images they produce are ephemeral strings of ones and zeroes, rarely printed, stored on chips and drives that are easily damaged or erased, susceptible to heat, magnets, wear, and obsolescence. A hard drive might last five years, a compact disc ten or fifteen. A well-printed snapshot will still be visible after a century—negatives even longer. We are no longer leaving behind a tangible, enduring photographic record of ourselves.
”
”
Ransom Riggs (Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past)
“
Chen turned back to the box and examined the picture through the glass. White smudges were appearing on the front and back surfaces of the photograph, but he still had a long way to go. Fingerprints were nothing but sweat. After the water evaporated, an organic residue was left. The fumes from the superglue reacted with the amino acids, glucose, and peptides in the organics to form a white goo, but growing the goo took time. John figured he still had another ten or fifteen minutes before the prints would be usable.
”
”
Robert Crais (The Watchman (Elvis Cole, #11; Joe Pike, #1))
“
From seven hundred journalists at the beginning of March, the number had dwindled to about one hundred and fifty—print reporters, TV correspondents, photographers, cameramen, and support personnel. At the press center I encountered Kazem, who only a week before I had asked for help with my visa. “Why are you staying when everyone else is leaving?” he asked. I took a chance and replied in Arabic. Some journalists, I said, are as samid as the Iraqi people. Samid means “steadfast” and “brave” and is the adjective most often used by Iraqis to describe themselves. Kazem laughed and threw his arm around my shoulder.
”
”
Richard Engel (And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East)
“
By some quirk of fate, I had been chosen—along with five others—as a candidate to be the next equerry to the Princess of Wales.
I knew little about what an equerry actually did, but I did not greatly care. I already knew I wanted to do the job. Two years on loan to the royal household would surely be good for promotion, and even if it was not, it had to be better than slaving in the Ministry of Defense, which was the most likely alternative.
I wondered what it would be like to work in a palace. Through friends and relatives I had an idea it was not all red carpets and footmen. Running the royal family must involve a lot of hard work for somebody, I realized, but not, surely, for the type of tiny cog that was all I expected to be.
In the wardroom of the frigate, alongside in Loch Ewe, news of the signal summoning me to London for an interview had been greeted with predictable ribaldry and a swift expectation that I therefore owed everybody several free drinks.
Doug, our quiet American on loan from the U.S. Navy, spoke for many. He observed me in skeptical silence for several minutes. Then he took a long pull at his beer, blew out his mustache, and said, “Let me get this straight. You are going to work for Princess Di?”
I had to admit it sounded improbable. Anyway, I had not even been selected yet. I did not honestly think I would be. “Might work for her, Doug. Only might. There’re probably several smooth Army buggers ahead of me in the line. I’m just there to make it look democratic.”
The First Lieutenant, thinking of duty rosters, was more practical. “Whatever about that, you’ve wangled a week ashore. Lucky bastard!” Everyone agreed with him, so I bought more drinks.
While these were being poured, my eye fell on the portraits hanging on the bulkhead. There were the regulation official photographs of the Queen and Prince Philip, and there, surprisingly, was a distinctly nonregulation picture of the Princess of Wales, cut from an old magazine and lovingly framed by an officer long since appointed elsewhere. The picture had been hung so that it lay between the formality of the official portraits and the misty eroticism of some art prints we had never quite got around to throwing away. The symbolic link did not require the services of one of the notoriously sex-obsessed naval psychologists for interpretation.
As she looked down at us in our off-duty moments the Princess represented youth, femininity, and a glamour beyond our gray steel world. She embodied the innocent vulnerability we were in extremis employed to defend. Also, being royal, she commanded the tribal loyalty our profession had valued above all else for more than a thousand years, since the days of King Alfred. In addition, as a matter of simple fact, this tasty-looking bird was our future Queen.
Later, when that day in Loch Ewe felt like a relic from another lifetime, I often marveled at the Princess’s effect on military people. That unabashed loyalty symbolized by Arethusa’s portrait was typical of reactions in messhalls and barracks worldwide. Sometimes the men gave the impression that they would have died for her not because it was their duty, but because they wanted to. She really seemed worth it.
”
”
Patrick D. Jephson (Shadows Of A Princess: An Intimate Account by Her Private Secretary)
“
I had thought photography could reflect the truth of a woman's beauty. But after seeing these horrible prints, I decided it was an imperfect art, impossible for the photographer and sitter to control. Painting, on the other hand, I began to believe, could reveal something greater than reality. In the right hands with the right chemistry between artist and sitter, painting could illuminate a higher truth. More to the point, it had the power to immortalize. A beautiful woman captured on canvas is eternally youthful, eternally adored. I thought of Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra: "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.
”
”
Gioia Diliberto (I Am Madame X)
“
Back then, when the culture was still building, people were loyal to stores, brands, and the cause. The style was retro-nineties, loud colors, vector or photographic driven, skinny jeans, selvage denim, lots of Japanese brands, and hip-hop/street culture content. There was also a political aspect to streetwear. Speaking for myself, I was sick of rocking logos for people. What people started printing their own shirts on AAA or American Apparel blanks, we got to rep the culture through the clothing. In the post-9/11 era, a lot of the more powerful messages about individuality, free speech, and what it was to be American manifested themselves in streetwear. (215)
”
”
Eddie Huang (Fresh Off the Boat)
“
Recommended Books Bruce Barnbaum: The Art of Photography, An Approach to Personal Expression Martin Evening: The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Book Jeff Schewe: The Digital Negative Tim Grey: Color Confidence. The Digital Photographer's Guide to Color Management
”
”
Robert Rodriguez Jr. (Digital Fine Art Printing: Field Guide for Photographers)
“
KIRKUS
REVIEWS
BOOK REVIEW
A retired professor explores the life and writings of Carl Sandburg in this debut book.
“During the first half of the twentieth century,” Quinley writes, “Carl Sandburg seemed to be everywhere and do everything.” Though best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry and multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln, Sandburg had a wide-ranging career as a public intellectual, which included stints in journalism as a columnist and investigative reporter, in musicology as a leading advocate and performer of folk music, and in the nascent movie industry as a consultant and film critic. He also dabbled in political activism, children’s literature, and novels. Not only does Quinley, a retired college administrator and professor, hail Sandburg as a 20th-century icon (“If my grandpa asks you a question,” his grandchildren joke, “the answer is always Carl Sandburg”), but much of his own life has been adjacent to that of the poet as well. Born in Maywood, Illinois, a “few blocks” from Sandburg’s home 30 years prior, Quinley would eventually move to the Appalachian Mountains. He lived just a few miles from Sandburg’s famed residence in Hendersonville, North Carolina. As a docent for the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, the author was often asked for literature about the luminary’s life. And though much has been written about Sandburg, biographies on the iconoclast are either out of print or are tomes with more than 800 pages. Eschewing comprehensiveness for brevity, Quinley seeks to fill this void in the literary world by offering readers a short introduction to Sandburg’s life and writings. At just 122 pages, this accessible book packs a solid punch, providing readers with not just the highlights of Sandburg’s life, but also a sophisticated analysis of his passions, poetry, and influence on American culture. This engaging approach that’s tailored to a general audience is complemented by an ample assortment of historical photographs. And while its hagiographic tone may annoy some readers, this slim volume is backed by more than 260 endnotes and delivers an extensive bibliography for readers interested in learning more about the 20th century’s “voice of America.”
A well-written, concise examination of a literary legend
Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 2600 Via Fortuna Suite 130 Austin, TX 78746
indie@kirkusreviews.com
”
”
John W. Quinley
“
Shortly after the war's end, posters went up all over the British and American zones [in Berlin]. Under a photograph of corpses at Bergen-Belsen was printed the sentence THIS IS YOUR FAULT.
”
”
Susan Neiman (Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil)
“
An Almost Made Up Poem
I see you drinking
at a fountain
with tiny blue hands,
no, your hands are not tiny
they are small,
and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered
and never heard from you again.
You used to write insane poems
about ANGELS AND GOD,
all in upper case,
and you knew famous artists
and most of them were your lovers,
and I wrote back,
it’ all right,
go ahead,
enter their lives,
I’ not jealous because we’ never met.
We got close once in New Orleans,
one half block,
but never met,
never touched.
So you went with the famous
and wrote about the famous,
and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried
about their fame –– not the beautiful
young girl in bed with them,
who gives them that,
and then awakens in the morning
to write upper case poems
about ANGELS AND GOD.
We know God is dead,
they’ told us,
but listening to you
I wasn’t sure.
Maybe it was the upper case.
You were one of the best female poets
and I told the publishers and editors:
“Her, print her, she’ mad but she’ magic.
There’ no lie in her fire.”
I loved you like a man loves a woman
he never touches,
only writes to,
keeps little photographs of.
I would have loved you more
if I had sat in a small room
rolling a cigarette and listened to you
piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen.
Your letters got sadder.
Your lovers betrayed you.
Kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray.
It didn’ help.
You said you had a crying bench
and it was by a bridge
and the bridge was over a river
and you sat on the crying bench
every night
and wept for the lovers
who had hurt and forgotten you.
I wrote back but never heard again.
A friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened.
If I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you
or you to me.
It was best like this.
”
”
Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell)
“
Some of them had to have Bible verses read to them because they could not decipher print themselves, so they had sharpened the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen senses of smell and hearing.
”
”
Toni Morrison (Home)
“
It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important—and worth doing.
”
”
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
“
Tesla > NYT. Elon Musk used the instrumental record of a Tesla drive to knock down an NYT story. The New York Times Company claimed the car had run out of charge, but his dataset showed they had purposefully driven it around to make this happen, lying about their driving history. His numbers overturned their letters. Timestamp > Macron, NYT. Twitter posters used a photo’s timestamp to disprove a purported photo of the Brazilian fires that was tweeted by Emmanuel Macron and printed uncritically by NYT. The photo was shown via reverse image search to be taken by a photographer who had died in 2003, so it was more than a decade old. This was a big deal because The Atlantic was literally calling for war with Brazil over these (fake) photos. Provable patent priority. A Chinese court used an on-chain timestamp to establish priority in a patent suit. One company proved that it could not have infringed the patent of the other, because it had filed “on chain” before the other company had filed. In the first and second examples, the employees of the New York Times Company simply misrepresented the facts as they are wont to do, circulating assertions that were politically useful against two of their perennial opponents: the tech founder and the foreign conservative. Whether these misrepresentations were made intentionally or out of “too good to check” carelessness, they were both attempts to exercise political power that ran into the brick wall of technological truth. In the third example, the Chinese political system delegated the job of finding out what was true to the blockchain. In all three cases, technology provided a more robust means of determining what was true than the previous gold standards — whether that be the “paper of record” or the party-state. It decentralized the determination of truth away from the centralized establishment.
”
”
Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
“
Freud proposes that the relation of unconscious memories to conscious perception is like that of the negative to the photographic print: "It has long since become common knowledge that the experience of the first five years of childhood exert a decisive influence on our life. ... The process may be compared to a photograph, which can be developed and made into a picture after a short or long interval." The powerful force of early childhood experiences remains latent and inaccessible, just as a negative can remain unprocessed for a long period of time before being made into a positive print.
”
”
Shawn Michelle Smith (Photography and the Optical Unconscious)
“
For me, the ultimate aim is always to get my work on print. To get my photos into a photo book, or a collection - to be able to look at it once it's completed, and feel satisfied I've done a good job. Getting a good book out, it's worth going through a bit of hassle or criticism, isn't it, for that? You can't care too much about what other people say. You've got to have guts.
”
”
Takeshi Nakamoto (Daido Moriyama: How I Take Photographs)
“
My gut churned as I scanned through grainy color photographs printed on standard printer paper. Next to each was a list of background and basic information. I felt like I was picking out a used car, not a bride.
”
”
Jill Ramsower (Silent Vows (The Byrne Brothers, #1))
“
To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense
”
”
Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media)
“
My gut churned as I scanned through grainy color photographs printed on standard printer paper. Next to each was a list of background and basic information. I felt like I was picking out a used car, not a bride. Was I actually considering this? Would I bind myself to some Italian Mafia princess I’d never even met?
”
”
Jill Ramsower (Silent Vows (The Byrne Brothers, #1))
“
And then, this time last month, a moving van arrived with all her possessions: a desk and chair, a bookshelf, boxes of books and DVDs, CDs, two suitcases filled with clothes, a large Matisse print of a cat with it's paw in a fish tank, and some framed photographs of people he did not know – which she placed and hung about the house, pushing things back, as though the house now belonged to her also. A good half of her books were in French, and she looked different without her make-up, going around in a tracksuit, sweating and lifting things and making him lift and move his own things, pushing back furniture, the strain showing so clearly on her face.
”
”
Claire Keegan (So Late in the Day)
“
A man can be aroused, even to erection, by a printed photograph of a woman’s body. He is not ‘fooled’ into thinking that the pattern of printing ink really is a woman. He knows that he is only looking at ink on paper, yet his nervous system responds to it in the same kind of way as it might respond to a real woman. We may find the attractions of a particular member of the opposite sex irresistible, even though the better judgment of our better self tells us that a liaison with that person is not in anyone’s long-term interests.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
“
Photos Cherish who you are now If you have been sorting and discarding things in the order I recommend, you have likely stumbled across photographs in many different places, perhaps stuck between books on a shelf, lying in a desk drawer, or hidden in a box of odds and ends. While many may already have been in albums, I’m sure you found the odd photo or two enclosed with a letter or still encased in the envelope from the photo shop. (I don’t know why so many people leave photos in these envelopes.) Because photos tend to emerge from the most unexpected places when we are sorting other categories, it is much more efficient to put them in a designated spot every time you find one and deal with them all at the very end. There is a good reason to leave photos for last. If you start sorting photos before you have honed your intuitive sense of what brings you joy, the whole process will spin out of control and come to a halt. In contrast, once you have followed the correct order for tidying (i.e., clothes, books, papers, komono, sentimental items), sorting will proceed smoothly, and you will be amazed by your capacity to choose on the basis of what gives you pleasure. There is only one way to sort photos, and you should keep in mind that it takes a little time. The correct method is to remove all your photos from their albums and look at them one by one. Those who protest that this is far too much work are people who have never truly sorted photos. Photographs exist only to show a specific event or time. For this reason, they must be looked at one by one. When you do this, you will be surprised at how clearly you can tell the difference between those that touch your heart and those that don’t. As always, only keep the ones that inspire joy. With this method, you will keep only about five per day of a special trip, but this will be so representative of that time that they bring back the rest vividly. Really important things are not that great in number. Unexciting photos of scenery that you can’t even place belong in the garbage. The meaning of a photo lies in the excitement and joy you feel when taking it. In many cases, the prints developed afterward have already outlived their purpose. Sometimes people keep a mass of photos in a big box with the intention of enjoying them someday in their old age. I can tell you now that “someday” never comes. I can’t count how many boxes of unsorted photographs I have seen that were left by someone who has passed away. A typical conversation with my clients goes something like this: “What’s in that box?” “Photos.” “Then you can leave them to sort at the end.” “Oh, but they aren’t mine. They belonged to my grandfather.” Every time I have this conversation it makes me sad. I can’t help thinking that the lives of the deceased would have been that much richer if the space occupied by that box had been free when the person was alive. Besides, we shouldn’t still be sorting photos when we reach old age. If you, too, are leaving this task for when you grow old, don’t wait. Do it now. You will enjoy the photos far more when you are old if they are already in an album than if you have to move and sort through a heavy boxful of them.
”
”
Marie Kondō (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1))
“
Digital technology offers new, imaginative ways to connect personally and powerfully with potential customers in traditional ways like direct marketing. A great example of this comes from a Toronto Porsche dealer who went around some of the Canadian city’s most affluent neighborhoods with a shiny white 911 sports car, a digital camera, and a mobile printer. Taking photographs of the brand new vehicle parked in the driveways of these upscale homes, the dealer printed out custom ads and dropped them into the mail slots. The campaign featured the provocative headline: “It’s closer than you think.” The result was an astonishing 32 percent response rate, which means about a third of these prospects called to schedule a test drive, a staggering improvement over the very low single digit response rates typically deemed successful in traditional direct mail efforts.
”
”
Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
“
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion
but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)
”
”
Margaret Atwood