DAILY BLOG

"Photography is a waiting game. The shutter may take only a instant, but the photographer has waited for exactly the right subject, the correct perspective, the perfect light, carefully arranging it all in the frame to be paused in time."

 

~ Douglas Gilbert

"It’s something I can’t stop, a photographer doesn’t retire"

~ Sheila Metzner

"I saw photographing jazz artists as a visual diary of what I was hearing. I wanted to preserve the mood and atmosphere as much as possible. My goal was to capture these artists at the height of their finest creative moments."

 

~ Herman Leonard
(1923-2010)

EXHIBITION OPENING

Sheila Metzner : Objects of Desire
November 4th, 2023 - January 5th, 2024

"All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us."

 

~ Alfred Stieglitz
(1918-2006)

“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom”

 

~ Bob Dylan

“Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York was like a prophecy come true. He fit the image that had already been established by Pete Seeger in his blue jeans and work shirts and by Woody Guthrie - a refugee from the dust bowl era -and his dirty rugged clothing. Dylan stepped into this legacy and played his character well with his own comedy and original insights. People remember that he was “stealing" from everybody around him, absorbing the entire scene. In the process he energized folk music, created his own songs, incorporated earlier American traditional music, shaped Rock’n’Roll and wrote some of the most moving songs of the century”

 

~ John Cohen
(1932 - 2019)

“I want to find an echo between myself and the world, a resonance”

 

~ Sarah Moon

"There had been a raging blizzard during the night. When I awakened in my bed, I looked toward the window to see a magnificent display of frost. Nature’s storm had playfully arranged what seemed to be stationary snowflakes on the pane of glass. Looking through the window and its decoration of frosted crystals. I saw a tree trunk with its branches rhythmically and joyfully dancing as if in celebration of the visual magic that was before my eyes. It was now up to me to quickly arise and to gather my equipment and film to etch all this beauty and magic onto film and silver paper”

 

~Paul Caponigro

“At that time, whatever Dylan would send to the record companies, they would use. He picked all the inside photographs also. They were lying around my studio and he chose them."

 

~ Jerry Schatzberg

“Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings....to capture some of this - I suppose that’s lyricism.”

~ Josef Sudek

“The work is grounded. It’s solid and it hasn’t changed.. I have, but not the photographs.. I have great admiration for whoever I was, whoever the person was that did the work somehow in that time”

 

~ Sheila Metzner

“Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities.”

~ Michael Kenna

"The awful truth is that I love all of cowboying, even when everything has gone wrong and it's not looking to get any better. Sometimes I especially like it that way."

~ Kurt Markus

“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity"

~ Henri Cartier Bresson

“It is still color, it is not yet light”

~Pierre Bonnard

"It took me 30 years and a lot of pain to discover the truth of what Henri Cartier Bresson always said “One should only use one camera, with one lens that coincides with your angle of vision, with the same film at its normal speed. The rest is just gimmicks and hardware”

~ Jean-Philippe Charbonnier

“She’s my first love”

~ Miles Davis

“He’s a man I have deep love for and huge admiration”

~ Juliette Greco

“All I can be is me - whoever that is.”

~ Bob Dylan

"I think that what you've got to do is discover the essential truth of the situation, and have a point of view about it"

~ Burt Glinn

"You always have two choices:
your commitment versus your fear"

~ Sammy Davis Jr.

“Being a photographer primarily involves being an observer, and on one particular day, while sipping coffee at the kitchen table, I noticed that the glass door leading out to the porch carried a patina of etched shapes upon it. It was wintertime and the cold of the outdoors meeting the warmth of the kitchen had left shapes like snowflakes and broader patches of frost across the entire pane of glass. The observer in me saw the potential for a picture and so I brought my view camera into the kitchen and played with the image on my ground glass until I created a good composition that exposed the uniqueness of the frost and winter’s handiwork. I focused on the plane carrying the frost and this selective focusing caused any objects behind the frosted glass to be seen as soft -edged and out of focus. A bright light falling on some objects on the porch appeared as a soft cloud in the midst of the frost pattern. In the final print from the negative, I was pleased with the coming together of shapes and tones that created a nebulous space in which mystery and beauty hovered together"

~ Paul Caponigro

"I heard something click, when I photographed the Edmund Petus bridge November 2022. I heard Sunday March 7, 1965. I heard dogs, horses, cries, all currency blowing in the wind, paying the price of change. Bridges connect, this bridge connects a less than pleasant past to promises of a brighter future. I heard it with my own eyes that night."

~ John Simmons

“The idea was that if I could light the cone and the sphere, the girl and the clothes would look alright”

~ Sheila Metzner

“I moved very well in front of the camera. My arms, my legs - I seemed able to do anything with them - I felt absolutely wonderful when I moved with Lillian. It was like being free - it was like being in heaven"

~ Barbara Mullen
(1927-2023)

“There are models that are not models but muses. She had everything marvelous: a beautiful neck, grace, the ability to respond to me”

~ Lillian Bassman
(1917-2012)

"I don’t always know why I’m photographing something. It’s my learning machine."

~ Bruce Davidson

"This appears to be a lonely picture when I look at it—like a couple of kids practicing harmonies alone in their back yard. Except that is the inverse of the truth: behind me are 250,000 marchers for the Washington March in 1963, 60 years ago. The biggest DC crowd ever at that time. Joan asked Bob to accompany her on one of the side stages before the march. Later, Baez sang alone on the big stage where Dr King made his Dream speech. This happened in August. The previous month, these two were at the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan's breakout weekend."

 

~ Rowland Scherman

"Photography is space, light, texture, of course, but the really important element is time - that nanosecond when the image organizes itself on the ground glass."

 

~ Ezra Stoller

We are looking forward to the opening of “The Power of Photography” exhibition at the Bowers Museum this Saturday! This exhibition will feature a selection of over 70 original prints curated by collector and gallerist Peter Fetterman, on view October 7th, 2023 to January 14th 2024. The museum will also be hosting a number of events around the exhibition including a lecture and book signing by Peter Fetterman on October 7th at the Bowers Museum. To attend the event online or at the museum please see below for tickets and more information.

“Though flaunting its charm by the light of day, the flower seems to have been hiding an aspect of it’s deeper interior as I studied it on my camera’s ground glass. Having photographed and studied the sunflower in many of its growing aspects, I was intrigued with the images presented in its process of drying and dying. Beauty always attended its outer aspects in life, whereas the folding up of the dying petals gave images a more interior and reflective stance, like that taught by the mystics”

~ Paul Caponigro

"I traveled the world, when it was a different time. I have been from A to Z, from Alaska to Zanzibar, Mongolia, you name it. It’s outstanding to think how much the world has changed in my lifetime, isn’t it?"

~ Sheila Metzner

“Driving alone in Hokkaido in 2002, I was startled to see this attractive fence, climbing a snow-covered hillside. I stopped the car by the side of the road and made photographs of the fence and hillside. Later I would need a truck driver to tow me out of the field of snow where I had inadvertently parked, but that’s another story. Almost every year I have returned to Hokkaido and have photographed this same fence and hillside. I was there just a few months ago in February of this year 2023. One might think that little would change in such a scene - it is just a fence and a hill after all. Yet, each time I revisit, I find that something is different - a new pattern and configuration might appear, an arrangement of forms could change, distant contacts or lengthens to become ambiguous, perspectives alter, snow levels vary, and the light is never the same. The minimalism and sheer simplicity transform three dimensions into two, and the space elements involved seem to make the print more like a Sumi-e ink painting than a photograph. So far, I have made and printed eight studies of this fence, and I fully anticipate a new study form this years’s visit. This location is a gift which keeps giving.”

~ Michael Kenna

"The camera for an artist is just another tool. It is no more mechanical than a violin if you analyze it. Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera.”

 

~ Brett Weston

“I like to have information rather than just have a brushstroke. Just to have these words to put in these feelings underneath.”

 

~ Jean-Michel Basquiat

"It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop. It's how you organize what you see into a picture."

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

“In time I came to realize that good photography was not the result of good technique alone. The expressive print requires emotional depth and not merely dazzle, and can only be artistically effective if the soft-edged realm of emotion is united with hard-edged technical concerns. Much like the ugly duckling’s story, one need await beauty through maturity, and this transition takes photography from a medium of recording to one of transforming. I saw that light, chemistry, film and coated papers were all endowed with the power to release the feeling of magic within the silver print. While working in the field or in my darkroom, I often felt that a complete openness to my subjects and materials brought about the notion that I alone was not making choices, but that the subjects and materials were at times choosing me. The picture making realm has a voice of its own and my primary tool working therein would be the ability to listen to a very pregnant silence”

 

~ Paul Caponigro

"I have entered into an unspoken, unwritten and generally inscrutable pact with the people I have photographed and lived among: if I promise not to tell all I know about them, they will do the same for me."

~ Kurt Markus
(1947-2022)

“What I want is to suggest rather than really show, I like my images to be little seeds sown in people's heads and for them to blossom in everyone's head.”

 

~ Patrick Taberna

“When I'm taking pictures I even forget that I have a camera. When I shoot I forget about everything. Light comes, death comes, people go in and out in costume—and it's like a play.”

 

~ Graciela Iturbide

“In the late 1990’s, I was afflicted with knee problems and had both knees replaced. The surgery was not that difficult, but therapy and exercise did prove to be tedious. As a result, I found it most difficult to heft my 5 x 7 view camera into the field along with the weighty tripod required. It then occurred to me that I could make photographs indoors as well as in the great outdoors. In the field, I often had found sticks, stones and bones that were interesting enough to enjoy in my home, and I began to look at them now as potential subjects for photographs. It was the beginning of a long period of trying to arrange objects well enough to avoid a stilted look. Nature always had her way of presenting her creations with grace and beauty, even within seemingly chaotic views”

 

~ Paul Caponigro

We are pleased to announce that we have secured a group of the first editions copies of the amazing new Magnum Opus book Bob Dylan, Mixing up the Medicine (published by our friends Callaway), due to be released October 24th, 2023. I know this first edition is close to selling out already and will become a highly sought out and valuable collectible book in the years to come as this is the definitive bible on Bob Dylan.

If you would like to pre order some copies please contact Peter at peter@peterfetterman.com. The book is available at $100 (+packing/shipping).

Bob Dylan
Mixing Up The Medicine
Publisher: Callaway
608 pages
$100.00

Exhibition Opening : Tuesday, October 24th. 5-7 PM

Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica
2525 Michigan Ave, Suite A1

RSVP's Essential

“Photography teaches us to see, and we can see whatever we wish. When I take a photograph, I make a wish. I was always looking for beauty.”

 

~ George Tice

“I believe only in the rectangle. Filling that rectangle with a photograph remains the most challenging thing you can do. If you have to go outside of it, bringing in other non-photographic things to put inside, you run the risk of gimmickry. For me, the most powerful expression is the simplest.”

~ Kurt Markus

“I’m interested in what it means to live in America. I’m interested in the kind of country that we live in and leave to our kids. I’m interested in trying to define what that country is. I got the “chutzpah” or whatever you want to say to believe that if I write a really good song about it, it’s going to make a difference”

~ Bruce Springsteen

“When our paths crossed I found the man who taught me happiness”

 

~ Robert Doisneau

“I seek refuge and simplicity in my photographs and find a personal resolution and fulfillment that I sincerely hope others experience as well.”

 

~ Jeffrey Conley

“From the city of Kyoto Japan, a tram may be taken to ascend the nearby mountain where temples, shrines and sand gardens nestle in among the shifting fog so prevalent at that altitude. With my camera, I moved as quietly as the fog itself and came upon a place where a temple structure and a large dark tree appeared as if bathing themselves in the mysterious mountain atmosphere. The quiet of the place and the dignity of the structures and tree created a sense of sanctity and inspired awe within this magical space. I believe that my photograph captured the beauty and peacefulness that was seldom encountered in the city’s bustle below.”

 

~ Paul Caponigro

“Always keep your eyes open. Keep watching. Because whatever you see can inspire you.”

 

~ Grace Coddington

"You never go out with your camera and come back saying I wish I hadn't done that"

 

~ Cig Harvey

“Photography's potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way"

 

~ Paul Caponigro

“I’ve had the privilege of being an outsider allowed on the inside searching for beauty, meaning and myself”

 

~ Bruce Davidson

“Everything inside the frame is equally important”

 

~ Pentti Sammallahti

“Humble's impres­sive output of colour photographs does for LA by day what Brassai did for Paris by night. Despite their geographic specificity, though, what makes Humble's pictures intriguing isn't the way they create a sense of place about the city, but how they capture its sense of dislocation. ”

 

~ Carmine Iannaccone

“I travelled to Laos at the behest of the photographer Kenro Izu to make photographs which could be used and auctioned to raise funds for his Children’s Hospital there. Over the space of ten days, I photographed Buddhist Temples, the Mekong River and various mountains, trees, and landscapes of this delightfully hospitable country.
Whilst I stayed in Luang Prabang, I would walk from my hotel into town each evening to find something to eat for dinner. One night, on my way home I came across a pond with lotus flowers, closed and asleep for the night. The next morning I was there early to photograph these gorgeous white flowers as they lay open, floating on the water’s surface. This lotus flower was particularly appealing and starkly beautiful: hence I referenced my wife Mamta in the title. A year or so later, somebody kindly pointed out to me that the flower was not a lotus but a water lily!

Apparently, lotus flowers hover six inches above the water, water lilies float. Fortunately, I have an understanding wife and we decided together that it was too late to change the title to Mamta’s Water Lily. What’s in a name anyway!”

 

~ Michael Kenna

“It was along a Kentucky Highway that I was prompted to stop and consider making a photograph of a stand of trees gracing the hillside that more than intrigued me. An inner feeling like “deja vu” convinced me to stop along the road to ponder what was before me and might soon be focused on my camera’s ground glass.

Having one’s attention sharply taken by a simple scene can give a state of inner quiet that helps in understanding more deeply the nature of such an encounter. I had the realization that I had seen, in exact detail this very landscape in one of my dreams prior to physically arriving at this seemingly predetermined place. Time and space had been patiently awaiting my arrival to create a photograph of the world in between. A nebulous and elusive dream space had found it’s way into the solid light of day”

 

~ Paul Caponigro

“The working class for me was the most important element of industrial and agricultural production.”

 

~ Sebastião Salgado

“In my personal quest for my family history, my aim is to make photographs that are not bound by time. Using the atmosphere of the past, I want to make history tangible and recognizable in the present”

 

~ Ilona Langbroek

“Viewers of this image are often surprised and question how the pears appear to be so white, since these fruits do have varying degrees of color to them. In fact the items I photographed were ceramic replicas of the fruit. My daughter-in-law had purchased a group of these accurately shaped ceramics and generously gave one to me upon my asking for it. While holding the ceramic pear in my hand to admire its beauty, I thought about taking a photograph of it. I looked about my house and found a simple wooden bowl to use as a background, but the combination did not satisfy. Remembering that my daughter-in-law had bought several of these ceramics, I asked her for another one, but she objected and suggested I borrow one only. I chose the second pear for being the right size and shape to sit harmoniously next to mine in the dark wooden bowl. This still-life arrangement pleased me and many others who have seen the photograph. When I gave my daughter-in-law a finished print of "Two Pears” she was especially pleased.”

~ Paul Caponigro

“W. Eugene Smith’s photo essays taught me that a photograph could not only communicate emotion, but could also save the human condition”

 

~ Bruce Davidson

“I believe that we all have the simple, (and sometimes incredibly complicated), responsibility to live to our highest potential. I bring this belief to my photography, (as well as everything else I do), and it has ensured that there is rarely a moment where I do not feel inspired and passionate.”

 

~ Michael Kenna

“If we feel more, I feel we will have more compassion. I use all of the formal devices that I have as an artist to ask, ‘How can I get you to look? How can I get you to live more?” 

 

~ Cig Harvey

“A great picture, no matter the medium used, has that wonderful power to draw you back, time and again, to pause and look upon it. There must be something chemical going on in the brain when you gaze upon a great work of art. It feels good and its addicting”

 

~ Laszlo Layton

“Tears fell from my eyes when I saw the first two prints. I said, "Mr. Fresson, I'm going to be working with you for a long time."

 

~ Sheila Metzner

“When I go out to photograph, I am wandering with a purpose. I am particularly captivated to the quietness and quality of light in the very early morning hours. I can control where I am and when I’m there- beyond that I am perfectly comfortable, with senses responsive, letting events unfold on their own terms. ”

 

~ Jeffrey Conley

“But my way of photographing a party would be to walk around constantly just looking for something interesting … you know, if a girl looked particularly beautiful, or if a guy was doing something outrageous, or if it was just an interesting composition.”

 

~ Dafydd Jones

“I like to have information rather than just have a brushstroke. Just to have these words to put in these feelings underneath.”

~ Jean-Michel Basquiat
(1960-1988)

“Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.”

 

~ Paul Caponigro

“I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects."

 

~ Josef Sudek

“Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work."

 

~ William Klein

“The basis for my artistic work is concrete observation. I am interested in the photographs as a physical object and all the prints are made by myself."

~ Kristoffer Albrecht

“I can do things here artistically that I couldn't do anywhere else."

~ Gregori Maiofis

“I tried to get under their skin. What if I were one of their colleagues? Working with the same equipment, and with my interest in zoology, what would I have come up with? My thinking was, what if one of those photographers were interested in wildlife?”

 

~ Laszlo Layton

“In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.”

~ Sebastião Salgado

“The mountains are calling, and I must go.”

~ John Muir

"Sometimes you walk a very thin line as an artist. It’s dangerous. You have to let yourself go, but not too far. "

~ William Gilles

"I was trying to give an honest picture of a city.
But San Francisco was so beautiful visually."

~ Max Yavno

"Well, if it stays with you—over time—it has a certain power, right? I think there are so many things about a photograph that might make it “great.” "

~ Brigitte Carnochan

"The key is to not let the camera, which depicts nature in so much detail, reveal just what the eye picks up, but what the heart picks up as well."

~ Paul Caponigro

“Lightning Strikes” was a combination of patience and luck. I had seen the shack and the bar sign and knew I wanted to return and find a photo. There were often lightning storms in late afternoon that summer and I frequently found myself at the location waiting for the lightning to no avail. One day, not only did I get the lightning, but it was pure luck that a single bolt appeared to be striking the bar”.

 

~ Roger Deakins

‘’Fashion designers offer one of the last refuges of the marvelous.They are in a way, the masters of dreams”

~ Christian Dior

“For me photography is pure fiction, even if it comes from life”

~ Sarah Moon

"In a machine age, making clothes is one of the last refuges of the human, the personal, the inimitable”

~ Christian Dior

"Long necks. The thrust of the head in a certain position. The way the fingers work, fabrics work. It’s all part of my painting background."

~ Lillian Bassman

“Perfection - you are striving towards the perfect print. In the darkroom, you can almost hear the applause, the accolade of this perfect print. If I know that I’ll be printing the next day I go to bed at night worrying and sometimes I'll actually scan the negative in my imagination whilst I’m lying in bed”

~ Don McCullin

"I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail."

~ Michael Kenna