Photography Sayings And Quotes

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.

Say to yourself, I am perfect, the way I am. Say to yourself, I am beautiful the way I am. Say to yourself, those who do not accept me the way I am, do not deserve me in their life.

A professor I had in college used to tell me that if someone won’t listen to what you have to say because you’re not wearing a tie, then put on a tie, ’cause what you have to say is more important than not wearing a tie. He was right.

The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).

Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourself and let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story. Let your very identity be your book. Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.

You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

Unpredictability. Accidents. Not good when you’re engaging in, say, brain surgery, but when lighting...wonderful!

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and therefore in order to really live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life.

A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you're an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you're probably under a restraining order.

A representational photograph says, 'This is what Vienna looked like.' An interpretational photograph goes one better and says, 'This is what Vienna was like. This is how I felt about it.

Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).

Every time the long-forgotten people of the past are remembered, they are born again!

Frozen in time, captured in memories, filled in passion, she melted in love before his eyes.

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

The Indians say to draw someone's portrait is to steal their soul, i am taking photographs, does it mean that i am just borrowing them?

No man thinks the same story when looking at a photo because every mind lived a different story!

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

You think too much and I bet it kills the magic," he says simply. "Some things are just instinct and if you try and replace that with thinking they die. You can read and think as much as you want before and after, but in the moment, man, you have to, like, let go.

...but she never knew what it was like to walk away from the thing she had most wanted. Years later she would say, "Photography allowed me to make the world and be in the world.

I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you.

But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.

In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening.

Later, Jenny would say she seldom knew what she would take a picture of when she picked up a camera, that she only knew once she peered through the viewfinder, as if the photograph had finally found her.

Dad says that the world is always changing, every second of every day, and so is everything in it, which means that the you you are right now is different from the you you were when you started reading this sentence. Crazy, right? And your memories change, too. (For instance, I swear the teddy bear I had growing up was green, but according to my parents it was orange.) But when you take a photograph, things stay still. The way that they were, is the way that they are, is the way that they will always be.

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

A famous artist is approached by a student. "You don't remember me," the student says correctly, "but years ago you said something that changed my life. You said, 'Photography is death.' After that," says the student, "I threw out my camera. I began again. I want to thank you for changing my life." "Leave me alone," says the artist. "Photography is life.

When the world asks "what was it like?" Only the photographer can say "See!

What do we feel when we look at a good photograph? We just want to be there, right at the exact moment that photo taken!

A good photograph never belongs to the past; every time you look at it, it is with you, it is alive and it is in the present moment!

I often come across this question. "Which is the best camera in the world?". I would always say, "Well. You already own two of it, since your birth.

There’s this family photo,” he says, “not the one in the hall, this other one, from back when I was six or seven. That day was awful. Muriel put gum in David’s book and I had a cold, and my parents were fighting right up until the flash went off. And in the photo, we all look so … happy. I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.

Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966)...For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

Listen my dear sister! You only fix something, when it’s broken. And you - are far from broken. Say to yourself, I am perfect, the way I am. Say to yourself, I am beautiful the way I am. Say to yourself, those who do not accept me the way I am, do not deserve me in their life.

The moon occurs more frequently than the sun as an image in lyric poetry. There is a greater contrast between the moon and the night sky than there is between the sun and the daytime sky. And this contrast is more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself, than it is to happiness, which always joins or blends. And to stand face-to-face with the sun is preposterous -- it would blind you. The moon has no light of its own; our apprehension of it is but a reflection of the sun. And some believe artists reflect the creative powers of some original impulse too great to name. The moon is the incunabulum of photography, the first photograph, the first stilled moment, the first study in contrasts. Me here -- you there. Between 1969 and 1972, six missions left for the moon and six missions came back. The men who went to the moon who were forever altered without exception all say the same thing -- it was not being on the moon that profoundly affected them as much as it was looking at the earth from the vantage point of the moon. You there -- me here.

He's got a box with a demon in it that draws pictures," said Rincewind shortly. "Do what the madman says and he will give you gold.

Whenever we look at a photograph, the memories in the photograph become our memories as well!

Our photographs are our best proof to others that we lived the things we lived in the past!

we are made of the sea, of the stars, of the flowers, of the sand, of the breeze...that's why it is not correct to say we are in love, for we are in everything, we are love

Jay Maisel always says to bring your camera, ‘cause it’s tough to take a picture without it. Pursuant to the above aforementioned piece of the rule book, subset three, clause A, paragraph four would be…use the camera. Put it to your eye. You never know. There are lots of reasons, some of them even good, to just leave it on your shoulder or in your bag. Wrong lens. Wrong light. Aaahhh, it’s not that great, what am I gonna do with it anyway? I’ll have to put my coffee down. I’ll just delete it later, why bother? Lots of reasons not to take the dive into the eyepiece and once again try to sort out the world into an effective rectangle. It’s almost always worth it to take a look.

I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death. He smashed that one first. My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven. He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands. 'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand. My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him. My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived. 'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured). Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. It is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract... A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material. The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.

Curiosity broke her earlier resolve. "Have you ever been tested?" "No." He stood behind Sara, holding the camera in front so she could see. "Zoom here," he said, flicking the toggle. "You could probably-" "This is macro." "Will-" "Super macro." He kept talking over her until she gave up. "Here's where you adjust for color. This is light. Anti-shake. Red-eye." He clicked through the features like a photography instructor. Sara Finally relented. "Why don't I point and you shoot?" "All right." His back was stiff, and she could tell that he was irritated. "I'm sorry I-" "Please don't apologize." Sara held his gaze for a few moments longer, wishing she could fix this. There was nothing to say if he wouldn't even let her apologize.

Also, Willie, I dig telling the truth. Words can be twisted but a photo never lies. Sutton laughs. What’s funny? Photographer says. Nothing. Except—that’s pure horseshit kid. I can’t think of anything that lies more than a photo. In fact every photo is a dirty stinking lie because it’s a frozen moment—and time can’t be frozen. Some of the biggest lies I’ve ever run across have been photos. Some of them were of me.

It’s that time of the month again… As we head into those dog days of July, Mike would like to thank those who helped him get the toys he needs to enjoy his summer. Thanks to you, he bought a new bass boat, which we don’t need; a condo in Florida, where we don’t spend any time; and a $2,000 set of golf clubs…which he had been using as an alibi to cover the fact that he has been remorselessly banging his secretary, Beebee, for the last six months. Tragically, I didn’t suspect a thing. Right up until the moment Cherry Glick inadvertently delivered a lovely floral arrangement to our house, apparently intended to celebrate the anniversary of the first time Beebee provided Mike with her special brand of administrative support. Sadly, even after this damning evidence-and seeing Mike ram his tongue down Beebee’s throat-I didn’t quite grasp the depth of his deception. It took reading the contents of his secret e-mail account before I was convinced. I learned that cheap motel rooms have been christened. Office equipment has been sullied. And you should think twice before calling Mike’s work number during his lunch hour, because there’s a good chance that Beebee will be under his desk “assisting” him. I must confess that I was disappointed by Mike’s over-wrought prose, but I now understand why he insisted that I write this newsletter every month. I would say this is a case of those who can write, do; and those who can’t do Taxes. And since seeing is believing, I could have included a Hustler-ready pictorial layout of the photos of Mike’s work wife. However, I believe distributing these photos would be a felony. The camera work isn’t half-bad, though. It’s good to see that Mike has some skill in the bedroom, even if it’s just photography. And what does Beebee have to say for herself? Not Much. In fact, attempts to interview her for this issue were met with spaced-out indifference. I’ve had a hard time not blaming the conniving, store-bought-cleavage-baring Oompa Loompa-skinned adulteress for her part in the destruction of my marriage. But considering what she’s getting, Beebee has my sympathies. I blame Mike. I blame Mike for not honoring the vows he made to me. I blame Mike for not being strong enough to pass up the temptation of readily available extramarital sex. And I blame Mike for not being enough of a man to tell me he was having an affair, instead letting me find out via a misdirected floral delivery. I hope you have enjoyed this new digital version of the Terwilliger and Associates Newsletter. Next month’s newsletter will not be written by me as I will be divorcing Mike’s cheating ass. As soon as I press send on this e-mail, I’m hiring Sammy “the Shark” Shackleton. I don’t know why they call him “the Shark” but I did hear about a case where Sammy got a woman her soon-to-be ex-husband’s house, his car, his boat and his manhood in a mayonnaise jar. And one last thing, believe me when I say I will not be letting Mike off with “irreconcilable differences” in divorce court. Mike Terwilliger will own up to being the faithless, loveless, spineless, useless, dickless wonder he is.

It’s the difference between your wife’s passport photograph and the portraits you took when you got engaged. Both may have been created with similar technology, but what stands in that great gulf between them are the passion you have for your wife, the knowledge you have of her personality, and your willingness to use your craft, time, and energy to express that. One says, “She looks like this.” The other says, “This is who she is to me. It’s how I feel about her. See how amazing she is?

Keep laser-focused on school, and I'll see YOU at Christmas. Josh leans his lanky body over my shoulder and peers at my laptop. "Is it just me,or is that 'YOU' sort of threatening?" "No.It's not just YOU," I say. "I thought your dad was a writer.What's with the 'laser-focused''gentle reminder' shit?" "My father is fluent in cliche. Obviously, you've never read one of his novels." I pause. "I can't believe he has the nerve to say he'll give Seany my best." Josh shakes his head in disgust. My friends and I are spending the weekend in the lounge because it's raining again. No one ever mentions this, but it turns out Paris is as drizzly as London. According to St. Clair,that is, our only absent member. He went to some photography show at Ellie's school. Actually,he was supposed to be back by now. He's running late.As usual. Mer and Rashmi are curled up on one of the lobby couches,reading our latest English assignment, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. I turn back to my father's email. Gentle reminder... your life sucks.

My life my selfie!

The moment defines the memories.

Capture the moment, that is all the miracle there is.

As long as we’re alive and interacting with life, the world, and the people around us, we’ll have something to say.

Photos which captures human sadness are the noblest and the most meaningful of all the photos!

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say its closer to 675 or 700.

All smiles for the camera are fake.

I don’t understand how everything moves so quickly. They say time flies when you’re having fun, but I wasn’t always having fun. Even when I was mad or sad, time was always on the run.

A lot of work you say? Absolutely, this process isn’t for people who desire the comfort of a Herman Miller chair and Adobe Photoshop, the physical work is part of what makes it special.

I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to take a picture of, or how to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time. Novels and movies don’t quite capture it; journalism doesn’t; photography, dance, painting, and theater don’t; molecular biology and quantum physics certainly don’t either. We haven’t understood how space and time exist now, how we really experience them. And until we find a way to document them, we will not understand them.

I suppose you could say these images present a glimpse of the world around me during the last 5 years as well as moments in time for the creatures and nature sharing the same space as me.

A photograph can communicate a couple things— and sometimes only one thing—very well. The more you try to say with your photograph, the greater the chance that you will say nothing at all.

His camera at home was just too crummy. That’s why all his pictures came out too dark or too light, and everyone in them had glowing red dots in their eyes. Greg wondered if this camera was any good.

The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: “Technique,” “Reality,” “Reportage,” “Art,” etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.

Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer's art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not (i)not(i) photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object (how could Kerész have 'separated' the dirt road from the violinist walking on it?). The Photographer's 'second sight' does not consist in 'seeing' but in being there. And above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not turn back to look at what he is leading — what hi is giving to me!

The idea of bearing witness is often very problematic as a concept, as a rhetorical tool, and as a literary device. We no longer need James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia. Everyone is a photographer now, so we are all witnesses. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness. Which means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. What is the function of seeing something, and saying something, if it doesn’t lead to concrete action or change?

When it comes to the notion of extraterrestrial life,” he began, “there exists a blinding array of bad science, conspiracy theory, and outright fantasy. For the record, let me say this: Crop circles are a hoax. Alien autopsy videos are trick photography. No cow has ever been mutilated by an alien. The Roswell saucer was a government weather balloon called Project Mogul. The Great Pyramids were built by Egyptians without alien technology. And most importantly, every extraterrestrial abduction story ever reported is a flat-out lie.

I came here in a car like everybody else. In a car filled with shit I thought meant something and shortly thereafter tossed on the street: DVDs, soon to be irrelevant, a box of digital and film cameras for a still-latent photography talent, a copy of On the Road that I couldn’t finish, and a Swedish-modern lamp from Walmart. It was a long, dark drive from a place so small you couldn’t find it on a generous map...Does anyone come to New York clean? I’m afraid not….Yes, I’d come to escape, but from what? The twin pillars of football and church? The low, faded homes on childless cul-de-sacs? Morning of the Gazette and boxed doughnuts? The sedated, sentimental middle of it? It didn’t matter. I would never know exactly, for my life, like most, moved only imperceptibly and definitely forward...Let’s say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at seven a.m. with the sun circulating and dawning, the sky full of sharp corners of light, before the exhaust rose, before the heat gridlocked in, windows unrolled, radio turned up to some impossibly hopeful pop song, open, open, open.

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it— say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity's turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left - indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority. The popularization of photography also increasingly devalues the standard views of things. As the first edition of the visible, nature comes into discredit. It can no longer assert its authority as the sender of binding messages - for reasons that ultimately come from its disenchantment through being scientifically explored and technically outdone. After this shift, 'being perfect' takes on an altered meaning: it means having something to say that is more meaningful than the chatter of conventional totalities. Now the torsos and their ilk have their turn: the hour of those forms that do not remind us of anything has come. Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection.

I was once present at a lecture that Eugene Smith gave to some students at a school of photography. At the end, they protested because he had made no mention of photography, but had spoken the whole time about music. He calmed them by saying that what was valid for one was valid for another. —Henri Cartier-Bresson

The sense of modernism is often seen in the determination of each of the arts to come as close as possible to its own particular nature, its essence. For instance, lyric poetry rejected anything rhetorical, didactic, embellishing, so as to set flowing the pure fount of poetic fantasy. Painting renounced its documentary, mimetic function, whatever might be expressed by some other medium (for instance, photography). And the novel? It too refuses to exist as illustration of a historical era, as description of society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts itself exclusively at the service of “what only the novel can say.

December 25, 4:30 p.m. Dear America, It’s been seven hours since you left. Twice now I’ve started to go to your room to ask how you liked your presents and then remembered you weren’t here. I’ve gotten so used to you, it’s strange that you aren’t around, drifting down the halls. I’ve nearly called a few times, but I don’t want to seem possessive. I don’t want you to feel like I’m a cage to you. I remember how you said the palace was just that the first night you came here. I think, over time, you’ve felt freer, and I’d hate to ruin that freedom, I’m going to have to distract myself until you come back. I decided to sit and write to you, hoping maybe it would feel like I was talking to you. It sort of does, I can imagine you sitting here, smiling at my idea, maybe shaking your head at me as if to say I’m being silly. You do that sometimes, did you know? I like that expression on you. You’re the only person who wears it in a way that doesn’t come across like you think I’m completely hopeless. You smile at my idiosyncrasies, accept that they exist, and continue to be my friend. And, in seven short hours, I’ve started to miss that. I’ve wonder what you’ve done in that time. I’m betting by now you’ve flown across the country, made it to your home, and are safe. I hope you are safe. I can’t imagine what a comfort you must be to your family right now. The lovely daughter has finally returned! I keep trying to picture you home. I remember you telling me it was small, that you had a tree house, and that your garage was where you father and sister did all their work. Beyond that I’ve had to resort to my imagination. I imagine you curled up in a hug with you sister or kicking around a ball with your little brother. I remember that, you know? That you said he liked to play ball. I tried to imagine walking into your house with you. I would have liked that, to see you where you grew up. I would love to see you brother run around or be embraced by your mother. I think it would be comforting to sense the presence of people near you, floorboards creaking and doors shutting. I would have liked to sit in one part of the house and still probably be able to smell the kitchen. I’ve always imagined that real homes are full of the aromas of whatever’s being cooked. I wouldn’t do a scrap of work. Nothing having to do with armies or budgets or negotiations. I’d sit with you, maybe try to work on my photography while you played the piano. We’d be Fives together, like you said. I could join your family for dinner, talking over one another in a collection of conversations instead of whispering and waiting our turns. And maybe I’d sleep in a spare bed or on the couch. I’d sleep on the floor beside you if you’d let me. I think about that sometimes. Falling asleep next to you, I mean, like we did in the safe room. It was nice to hear your breaths as they came and went, something quiet and close keeping me from feeling so alone. This letter has gotten foolish, and I think you know how I detest looking like a fool. But still I do. For you. Maxon

travel to that place you always wanted to see, go see it, only excuses are stopping you. say all those things you wanted to say to those people you never said them to, only pride is keeping you from it. learn to do that thing you always wanted to do, and do it, only fear is holding you back...do not instead make up a list of all the stuff you want to do before you die, just start doing it, and do it now. do not wait for 'one day.' experience what you can right here, right now, before it all changes...because it will change. the tides of change are as constant as time itself. as buddha once said, ' nothing is forever except change'...so take nothing for granted, nothing is guaranteed except that it will all change one day...

One fine morning, I awoke to discover that, during the night, I had learned to understand the language of birds. I have listened to them ever since. They say: 'Look at me!' or: 'Get out of here!' or: 'Let's fuck!' or: 'Help!' or: 'Hurrah!' or: 'I found a worm!' and that's all they say. And that, when you boil it down, is about all we say. (Which of those things am I saying now?)

One thing you can say for the middle ages, in those days, if you went out to find something, like say, the True Cross, you always managed to find it. Those were the days. Even when two different people were sent out in search of the same thing, say John the Baptist’s skull, for example, they both found it. Just try finding that kind of efficiency these days [http://www.port-magazine.com/art-phot...].

We believe our eyes capture images from the world like a camera, then relay these images to our brain. Our eyes “photograph,” say, the coffee mug in front of us. It’s a nice model. It is also wrong. Seeing is less like photography and more like language. We don’t see the world so much as converse with it. What is that? Looks like a coffee mug, you say? Let me check my database and get back to you. Yep, it’s a

They say there is always a photographic moment to be seized where the most banal of beings yield up their secret identity. But what is interesting is their secret alterity, and rather than looking for the identity beneath the appearances, we should look for the mask beneath the identity, the figure which haunts us and diverts us from our identities -- the masked divinity which, in effect, haunts each of us for a moment, one day or another.

This book does not try to “document” any particular aspect of Indian life. To me, doing such a thing would seem a pretentious and pseudo-scientific undertaking, especially for someone from the West. The photographs also make no intentional social or political statement. I never say, when discussing my work, that I am “concerned” with anything (another favorite word tossed about, all too much, by young and socially conscious post-modernists).

Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object: in order to take the first portraits the subject had to assume long poses under a glass roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as much as surgical operation; then a device was invented, a kind of prosthesis invisible to the lens, which supported and maintained the body in its passage to immobility: this headrest was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence.

Some individuals came right out and accused me of being a Neo-Orientalist (in a pejorative Edward Said sense of the term). So of course eventually I bristled at the questions themselves. They seemed to stem from an obsessive political correctness that wished to brand every Western photographer working in Asia as a neo-colonialist, an ethnographer, or a culprit secretly advancing a hegemonic agenda. The idea that people of one culture cannot create valid art in another I found ludicrous and restrictive to say the least.

Looking into the mirror I ask myself: "You live in a house equipped with air conditioning. You eat tasty food. You utilize convenient transportation to travel. You utilize convenient information technology to live. Could you not say that you, who do all this, are not a dictator? Isn't it right that you life is supported by somebody else's death? Doesn't your life that exists at the expense of somebody else's sacrifice infinitely resemble the life of a dictator who only cares about his own life?" -Yasumasa Morimura (excerpt from "Mr. Morimura's Dictator Speech").

There’s this family photo,” he says, “not the one in the hall, this other one, from back when I was six or seven. That day was awful. Muriel put gum in David’s book and I had a cold, and my parents were fighting right up until the flash went off. And in the photo, we all look so … happy. I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.

There's this family photo," he says, "not the one in the hall, this other one, from back when I was six or seven. That day was awful. Muriel put gum in David's book and I had a cold, and my parents were fighting right up until the flash went off. And in the photo, we all look so . . . happy. I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren't real. There's no context, just the illusion that you're showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn't snapshots, it's fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it's just a very convincing lie.

A photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things; it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves. But wanting to say that may well make us ontologically restless. ‘Photographs present us with things themselves’ sounds, and ought to sound, paradoxical … It is no less paradoxical or false to hold up a photograph of Garbo and say, ‘That is not Garbo,’ if all you mean is that the object you are holding up is not a human creature. Such troubles in notating so obvious a fact suggest that we do not know what a photograph is; we do not know how to place it ontologically. We might say that we don’t know how to think of the connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of.

John Berger’s observation on the historic depictions of women’s bodies in photography and painting from his book Ways of Seeing: To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually… One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at…Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

This photo is classic aestheticism. The engaging expression, the loose dress and fluid posture. Early to mid-1860's, if I had to guess." "It reminded me of the Pre-Raphaelites." "Related, definitely; and of course the artists of the time were all inspired by one another. They obsessed over things like nature and truth; color, composition, and the meaning of beauty. But where the Pre-Raphaelites strove for realism and detail, the painters and photographers of the Magenta Brotherhood were devoted to sensuality and motion." "There's something moving about the quality of light, don't you think?" "The photographer would be thrilled to hear you say so. Light was of principal concern to them: they took their name from Goethe's color wheel theories, the interplay of light and dark, the idea that there was a hidden color in the spectrum, between red and violet, that closed the circle. You have to remember, it was right in the middle of a period when science and art were exploding in all directions. Photographers were able to use technology in ways they hadn't before, to manipulate light and experiment with exposure times to create completely new effects.

Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.

Never apologize for what you feel, it's like saying sorry for being real.” – Anonymous

He has a rather fluid style,” says Hirsch, who was already cutting together scenes. “Not that he moves the camera all that much; he moves the camera at a certain moment through a scene and his staging of the action is fluid. Kersh doesn’t cover a scene in a simplistic way. He doesn’t shoot a master and then go in for close-ups. He will shoot mini masters that overlap at certain key points. It’s a subtle thing. He really knows what he’s doing.” “I stage differently from George; I use the camera differently,” says Kershner. “I use the actors in a different way. I certainly love his work but mine is just different. The photography is totally different, the lighting, the movement.

Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI), which says that everything that can happen, does happen. The universe continually branches out like budding yeast into an infinitude of universes that contain every possibility, no matter how remote. You now occupy one of the universes. But there are innumerable other universes in which another “you,” who once studied photography instead of accounting, did indeed move to Paris and marry that girl you once met while hitchhiking. According to this view, embraced by such modern theorists as Stephen Hawking, our universe has no superpositions or contradictions at all, no spooky action, and no non-locality: seemingly contradictory quantum phenomena, along with all the personal choices you think you didn’t make, exist today in countless parallel universes. Which is true? All the entangled experiments of the past decades point increasingly toward confirming Copenhagen more than anything else. And this, as we’ve said, strongly supports biocentrism. Some physicists, like Einstein, have suggested that “hidden variables” (that is, things not yet discovered or understood) might ultimately explain the strange counterlogical quantum behavior. Maybe the experimental apparatus itself contaminates the behavior of the objects being observed, in ways no one has yet conceived.

Do women always take this long?” Darién sprang forward to find out what was keeping his bride, but Maxim, Shara and Serone stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “She’s late!” the prince fumed, his heart pounding, and his breathing ragged. “Maybe she changed her mind,” he said before Maxim snapped a picture of him with a digital camera, blinding him. “What the hell?” Darién shook his head to clear the momentary stun from the flash. Maxim shrugged nonchalantly, his wicked dark eyes glittering with humor, “Aleta put me in charge of photography--something about making a scrapbook…or whatever. Anyway…nothing says good times like a stressed-out groom on the verge of nuclear.” He smiled, wagging his dark brows up and down. “Priceless.

Cedar Valley It's well offthe beaten path, and that's just how wilderness-lovers like it Nick Nault Photography Island Lake Lodge, about 15 kilometres outside of Fernie, offers in-chalet luxury and pristine mounds of snow as far as the eye can see. Mark Sissons | 878 words They say there are no friends on a powder day. This may be true at most North American ski resorts, where it's every powder hound for himself in the mad morning rush to lay down first tracks after an overnight dump, but not from where I'm standing, perched on a ridgeline overlooking the

It is important to be on the alert for “the decisive moment,” says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.

was looking at her differently. She brushed it aside. One of her imaginings, Mom would say. Her crazy hunches about people. "Really?" he asked casually. "Isn't the lighthouse automated now?" "I'm not running it. I'm doing some photography for the

I understand the pull photography has. Any art, really. Anything that lets you capture the world as you see it and say things you can't say with words. Sometimes it's more important than anything else.

A stronger analogy to Eisenstein's analysis of the rising pattern in the music and the visuals can be found in the contrapuntal practice in music whereby a theme is juxtaposed against either an augmented (the note values are doubled) or diminished (the note values are halved) version of itself. The listener can thus simultaneously experience two different temporal elaborations of the same melodic line across a single block of chronological time, just as the viewer/listener in Alexander Nevsky can experience two different temporal elaborations of the rising motion across a single block of chronological time. (Needless to say, an oppositional "counterpoint" could also be set up by creating, for instance, an upward movement in the music and a downward one in the visuals.) But the experience here is doubly enriched, since the simultaneity also includes two different modes of perception, visual and aural, which is, one suspects, one of the underlying raisons d'être of the gesamtkunstwerk. Even on the simplest of levels, then, Eisenstein's "vertical montage" involves the simultaneous, layered presentation of a number of different elements. For the first shot, these layers would stack up as follows: 1. Graphic perception (photography) 2. Musical perception (score) 3. Upward movement 1 (graphic) 4. Upward movement 2 (musical) 5. Synchronicity 1 (graphic) 6. Synchronicity 2 (musical)

It doesn’t matter if you use a box camera or a Leica, the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing. What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing. To have them realize without saying so, that it was up to them to give me whatever they wanted to give me . . . if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatizes this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about Helsinki’s main bus station. There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops. Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own. What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

My mum always says there is no such thing as a new idea, and if that’s true (which I’m not sure it is), fashion is certainly the best exemplar. Everything comes round and round in terms of style of clothes and photography but, still, in each iteration they do have something different.

5. not-so-magic hour The most flattering light for vacation photos is the golden glow just before sunset or right after sunrise, and the most unflattering is, undoubtedly, the full-strength glaring sun. Make the best of a bright situation by seeking the softer light created by the shade of a beach umbrella, cabana, lifeguard tower, or tall lifeguard. If there's no shade in sight and you're truly committed, ask your subject to face their own shadow, and angle a boogie board to bounce light on their face. Or just ask everyone to close their eyes and look down, then, on the count of three, look up and say "Pina colada." Smiles, guaranteed.

For the past twenty minutes Keith had been explaining to Jackson Crane his philosophy of art, and how this was reflected in his own practice. "I would say I don't really have a /medium/, you know? Painting, photography, poetry, sculpture - I've mastered them all. It's not for me to call myself a Renaissance man, but. . ." He shrugged. "It has been said. Really if I had to say what my art was /about/, though, it's a celebration of the female form but also a rumination on the gaze. That's why I only use the body, not the head, so they're not looking backing at you - there's a purity there, you know? /In the looking./ Power in anonymity. I want to confront the viewer - but I'm posing questions. The viewer has to answer those questions themselves . . .

The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.