#C20th

“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures”

~ Don McCullin

“My images reach dimensions words cannot touch. My quest, through the magic of light and shadow is to isolate, to simplify and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity. To indicate ideal proportion, to reveal sculptural mass and the dominating spirit is my goal”
~ Ruth Bernhard

“While you’re on stage, the audience is standing and applauding and yelling. But when you get home, you take off all your clothes and get into bed alone and that can really do something to your head and your heart.

~ Nina Simone


"Time can pass and everything can change in the world except the emotion you get from a photograph”

~ John Simmons

"I’ll do the printing myself until I die. Printing is a personal thing. I couldn’t print your work. You couldn’t print mine. It wouldn’t be the same. So when I die, I’ll have all of my negatives destroyed”

 

Brett Weston
(1911-1993)

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“So you arrive in a place that seems good, where things are composed harmoniously in the space. Then you wait. Waiting with irrational crazy hope. Then people come into the frame and “click” you take the picture"

 

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

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“Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss Slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that made you smile”

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

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“I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well”

 

~ Gordon Parks
(1912-2006)

 

 

“My clothes are too chic for most women. If they want to wear them all right, but they’ve got to live up to them”

 

~ James Galanos
(1924-2016)

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“My Credo, my way of life, my very being is based on images capable of engraving themselves indelibly in our inner soul’s eye. Also, through my personal vision, to reveal what cannot be readily seen, to capture what is most meaningful, to enrich our appreciation of life. It is to explore and celebrate the human condition and the world around us, nature and man together, to find significance in suffering and all that is profound, beautiful and nourishes the soul. Above all, I believe in creative work through struggle to increase human wisdom and happiness”

 

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

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“I have never been drawn by one thing in particular other than finishing what I started. That’s always been an obsession of mine. I was also determined to be successful in all the assignments I undertook. When I worked on advertising shoots, I chose the sets myself and really took things seriously. In my personal work, my commitment lays in the interest I had in seeing everything around me, in documenting it all and in letting myself be surprised by people, by what was going on in the street and all around me"

 

~ Sabine Weiss
(1924-2021)

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“Take one camera with film: add one knowing eye and as much strong feeling as you have available: mix well with a generous portion of your own unique personality: expose to the right light for the exact fraction, and process until beauty appears”

 

~ Ruth Bernhard
(1905-2006)

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“I was very sensitive to poverty, to children and people in need. I probably had a more compassionate way of looking at things”

 

~ Sabine Weiss
(1924-2021)

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“Throughout my life I’ve never pursued anything. I just let things pursue me, they just show up. This is the way I’ve lead my life, not just in photography but in life”

 

~ Manuel Álvarez Bravo
(1902-2002)

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“Fashion has been something I’ve done and enjoyed— I love fashion but I also like other things I’ve photographed, whatever had an echo”

 

~ Sarah Moon

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"Theoretical scientists who probe the secrets of the universe and philosophers who seek answers to existence, as well as painters such as Paul Klee who find scientific inquiries compatible with art, influence me far more than most photographers. My interest in such people is to share in their wonderment of nature and, in sharing, find added inducement to go out, look, feel, and photograph."

 

~ Wynn Bullock
(1902-1975)

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"I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in."

~ Steve McCurry

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“The world I was trying to present was one where I would feel good, where people would be friendly, where I could find the tenderness I longed for"

 

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

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“What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera notes with relentless fidelity."

 

~ Berenice Abbott
(1898-1991)

"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist and this inner life would result in his or her personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination”

 

~ Edward Hopper

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"The best things happen when you happen to be somewhere with a camera”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt
(1928-2023)

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“A fantastic picture you do in a fraction of a second but to arrive to do this picture you must put your life in there, to give your time and to receive it from the community that you come to see”

 

~ Sebastião Salgado

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“The real truth of life is on the streets. Photograph the daily lives of people and how they exist and how they fight for space and time and pleasure”

 

~ Don McCullin

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"I don’t think photography has anything remotely to do with the brain. It has to do with eye appeal”

 

Horst P. Horst
(1906-1999)

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“Behind everything is an energy, a spirit, an essence. That gives it existence. Photography is a means to appreciate the many manifestations of my collective self. The camera is my vehicle of exploration in capturing images that make my heart smile. I’m collecting external mirrors of myself”

 

~ Chester Higgins Jr

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"This photograph is a negative print: what we see here is the tonal reverse of the positive original. How it was made, however, does not intrude on our visual experience of the image, and this was important to Bullock. For some, this is a picture of fertility, generation and abundant life. The fact that these qualities are expressed through rock – a rock filled with seed pebbles aglow with new life – only serves to enhance and extend our appreciation of them."

 

~ Chris Johnson and Barbara Bullock-Wilson
from Wynn Bullock: 55, Phaidon Press, 2001

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“I realized very young that photography would be my means of expression. I was more visual than intellectual. I was not very good at studying. I left high school. I left on a summer day on a bicycle.”

 

~ Sabine Weiss
(1924-2021)

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"We were spending our summer vacation near Aubagne where I photographed this older man playing boules. It is an ordinary scene, but I found the man very colorful in his postures.”

 

~ Willy Ronis
(1910 -2009)

 

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

~ William Butler Yeats
(1865 - 1939)

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“It’s a romantic, emotional moment in time”

 

~ Ansel Adams
(1902-1984)

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"In the beginning, I had no thought of making the series [The North American Indian] large enough to be of any value in the future, but the thing has grown so that I now see its great possibilities, and certainly nothing could be of much greater value."

 

~ Edward S. Curtis
(1868–1952)

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“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

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"When I was in high school – 1960s – I became interested in photography and that was when I remember seeing your father’s work for the first time…. Like everyone of that era, I was impressed by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams…and other big names of the times, but your father’s photographs ended up being much more than that to me. His pictures haunt me, inspire me, and give me the courage to write. His bio suggests a lifelong searcher to me, a man on a quest to understand life and put his heart into every picture he created. I know that can’t be an easy path as it is also one I’ve chosen. The destroyed typewriter is probably my favorite image, if I am forced to name one…. Without your dad’s work…I wouldn’t be the writer I am today."

 

~ Jo-Ann Mapson
from a letter written to Wynn’s daughter Barbara
October 19, 2011

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“A combination of the right choice of detail, the elimination of all that is inessential and the right moment that makes the picture"

 

~ Wolfgang Suschitzky
(1912-2016)

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“One day I wanted to make some nude photographs which I had never done before. Lisa had a very beautiful body and was not afraid of her body...she was used to "Nacktkultur"

 

~ Horst P. Horst

 

“I was always aware that Horst had a warm feeling for the personalty, the sexuality of me as a model. Even at our very first sitting when we were both so inexperienced, I felt lapped in calm and beauty and luxury and glamour-and yet as though I were in my own house, not just posing in it, but living in its myself”

 

 

~ Lisa Fonssagrives

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“There are no words to convey the moods of those moments. I believe that if I am able to express what I saw and felt, the image will contain qualities that may provide a basis for an imaginative response by the viewer”

 

~ Ansel Adams
(1902-1984)

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“Paris is always a good idea.”

 

~ Audrey Hepburn
(Sabrina)

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"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

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“Curiosity is everything. I don’t think you can create luck. You’re either lucky or you’re not. I don’t know if it’s really luck or if it’s just curiosity. I think the main ingredient, or a main ingredient for photography is curiosity. If you’re curious enough and if you get up in the morning and go out and take pictures, you’re likely to be more lucky than if you stay at home .”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

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“The joy of geometry ! When you realize everything is right"

 

~ Henri Cartier Bresson

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“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it”

 

~ Irving Penn
(1917-2009)

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"My collecting mantra is very simple: always be open and receptive, and only collect something that moves you or changes you in some way.  Collecting is like reading a great novel; you are one person before and one person after. That’s the litmus test on whether or not you should acquire an image. Does it haunt you?"

 

~ Peter Fetterman

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"The qualities that have fascinated me and led me to make a particular photograph are usually quite intuitive. I generally don't have a completed concept in my mind when I begin--I move things around, change angles, lighting - until everything seems right."

 

~ Brigitte Carnochan

 

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“It’s about the body, it’s about the gesture, the feeling of being a woman. I can’t intellectualize what I do, and I don’t. A lot of it is purely instinctual"

 

~ Lillian Bassman
(1917-2012) 

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“Photography is nothing - it’s life that interests me”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004)

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“I’ve entered into an unspoken, unwritten, and generally inscrutable pact with the people I have photographed and lived amongst. If I promise not to tell all I know about them, they will do the same for me”

~ Kurt Markus

(1947 - 2022)

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"Perhaps the most important thing to note about this haunting photograph is that it was not fabricated by the artist. The woman was a waif who had been given shelter by the caretaker of a remote ranch in Big Sur. It was a favorite site for Bullock and he had become friends with her, occasionally giving her work as a model. Earlier in the day, Bullock had been shaken by a strong premonition that she would eventually be forced to give up her son. When she put him on the bed for a nap and then moved to the edge of it, the premonition seemed to come to life before his eyes. It should also be noted that the book on the window sill that gives the photograph its title is a classic text on how to make one’s way across dark waters."

 

~ Chris Johnson and Barbara Bullock-Wilson
from Wynn Bullock: 55, Phaidon Press, 2001

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“One must always take photos with the greatest respect for the subject and for oneself”

~ Henri Cartier Bresson

“He was the Tolstoy of Photography with profound humanity. He was the witness of the 20th Century”

~ Richard Avedon

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“Taking pictures of celebrities is exactly like taking pictures of non-celebrities. Compose the photograph properly, try to evoke something special or unique given the available possibilities. Above all do not be intimidated. Remember that even the most exalted celebrities brush their teeth at night before going to bed”

~ Elliott Erwitt
(1928-2023)

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“I try to be aware of light at all times, I am always watching for it. I am not looking at light because I am a photographer. I am photographing because I am deeply involved with light”

 

~ Ruth Bernhard
(1905-2006)

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“It was a joyous route, such magnificent sights and human splendor along the way that difficulties magically effaced themselves. One regretted nothing and would have it no other way”

 

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

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“I like the streets. I grew up in the streets”

~ William Klein
(1928-2022)

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Bullock’s pictures have great power. They are at once simple and complex, stark and tender, precise and suggestive…. Opposites are…intensely present in the work of Wynn Bullock and his pictures radiate meaning.

~ Nat Herz
from “Wynn Bullock: A Critical Appreciation”, Infinity, Nov. 1961

"In 1957, the year Log and Horsetails was made, I turned twelve and the major topics for morning walks and talks with Dad were “space/time” and “opposites” and how those concepts could enrich our capacities to perceive, understand, and interrelate to the world within and around us… Not surprisingly, at that time I certainly couldn’t have described what he talked about in the way I just have. However, when I first saw Log and Horsetails, I had an “aha” moment and a seed of understanding began to take root. In addition to being an eloquent, richly meaningful image, for me it will always be a treasured reminder of Dad as a teacher/mentor as well as a marker of my own growth as a person."

~ Barbara Bullock-Wilson

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“Life is once, forever"

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

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“I first came to Somerset in 1940. I was sent here as an evacuee during the Second World War. I was five when I arrived at Frome station wearing a gas mask, hand in hand with my three year old sister. We were selected for the same beautiful village, Norton St Philip, but we were separated. My sister went to the big house, while I went to a farm laborers home. We had come from a family living in poverty amid the violence of Finsbury Park. I’ve always held onto those childhood memories of streams snaking through hazel trees and cows standing in the grass looking lost. Somerset was yeoman farmer’s country with hedged fields that looked like quilted blankets and hedgerows covered in buttercups”

 

~ Don McCullin

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“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

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“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went.”

 

~ Will Rogers

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"Firm, fleshy, glistening with juice, this is an apple you want to eat. Looking at it from another perspective, the center of the halved fruit reveals a face-like form, raising the suggestion that humanity can be seen as an integral part of nature."

~ Chris Johnson & Barbara Bullock-Wilson
from Wynn Bullock: 55, Phaidon Press, 2001

"Dad called this photograph one of his “seed pictures”. He once said, “It is not that I am uninterested in telling visual stories about people and their everyday lives. I just like to leave this kind of work to others. What I prefer is to trace the hidden roots of humanity deeply embedded in nature.” Years after making this image, he explored this theme more deeply and explicitly in what turned out to be one of his last and most evocative bodies of work."

~ Barbara Bullock-Wilson

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"I see pictures I would like to take. I need another lifetime to photograph San Francisco. But my life has been so much fun I can't believe it”

 

~ Fred Lyon
(1924-2022)

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“Somehow the earlier photographers had as yet not captured the attitudes and gestures that women assumed. They seemed to freeze in front of the lens as if posing for their portraits whereas the top fashion illustrators would render them as they actually saw them in real life. Was there no way of achieving the same results with photography?”

~ George Hoyningen Huene

“The dress must not hang on the body but follow its lines. When a woman smiles the dress must smile with her”

~ Madeleine Vionnet
(1876-1975)
French Fashion Designer

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“As I drove along the dusty road to Prades in 1954, I had the feeling that I was on a pilgrimage bent. I was going to meet that great self-exile and patron saint of music, Pablo Casals. He did not disappoint me. I had never photographed a warmer or more sensitive human being."

 

~ Yousuf Karsh
(1908 - 2002)

“Of course, I continue to play and to practice. I think I would do so if I lived for another hundred years.”

 

~ Pablo Casals
(1876 - 1973)

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“A photograph fulfills my deep need to stop things from disappearing”

 

~ Dorothy Bohm
1924 - 2023

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“Memories, that’s the thing about photography.. I look at the contact sheet and it brings back everything.. Whether I was tired, whether I was full of beans”

 

~ William Klein
(1928-2022)

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“A new monumental dignity, a new displacement of space and time had taken hold of the visual arts. Antiquity celebrated its arrival on Montmartre to the sounds of a jazz band, Ionic columns rose next to smoking factory chimneys… Between the pedestals from which the gods of Greece looked naked and silently into the land between snorting horses and athletically built heroic figures, the ladies and gentlemen from Paris, London, New York and Biarritz sunned themselves”

~ George Hoyningen Huene

“A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn. As soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it or tries to, glorifies or destroys it or makes it into a song of beauty”

~ Elsa Schiaparelli

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"The truly fashionable are beyond Fashion”

 

~ Cecil Beaton
1904-1980

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“I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

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“You cannot live when you are untouchable. Life is vulnerability"

 

~ Edouard Boubat
1923-1999

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“New York is a city I loved, a city that forgives nothing but accepts everyone - a place of a thousand moods and vistas, of countless faces in a moving crowd, each one silently talking to you”

 

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

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“In this series of portraits the countenance served as a mirror in which I looked at myself, wondered and searched for meaning...the strength of the glance lies in the power it has to reverse my own, and this power reaches its most intense value if it manages to reverse the spectator’s as well. To the observer, to discover him or her self in this internal, silent gaze, accompanied by this immobile countenance that stares back at him, means to become aware that. We all share a common destiny. A reflection on beauty as fragility, memory as pain and time as a continuous fall”

 

~ Luis González Palma

“You do things for yourself and you do things for other people and you hope that these things coincide”

 

~ William Klein
(1928-2022)

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“When I take a photograph I make a wish”

 

~ George Tice

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“You should find these things yourself. You should never copy. I never look at other photographers’ work. You have to see it for yourself "

 

~ Horst P. Horst

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“There was no such thing as a photography galleries in the 1930’s. Photography was not considered collectable works of art in those days”

 

~ Wolfgang Suschitzky
(1912-2016)

 

 

“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place, it is not agreeable or cheerful or easy or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent"

 

~ Oscar Wilde

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“There is a brief moment when all that there’s in a man’s mind and soul and spirit may be reflected through his eyes, his hands his attitude. This is the moment to record. This is the elusive “moment of truth”."

 

~ Yousuf Karsh
(1908 - 2002)

 

 

“If I don’t practice one day, I know it.
Two days the critics know it. Three days the public knows it”

 

~ Jascha Heifetz
(1901 - 1987)

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“Of course I am curious and when I arrive in a place I like to see and understand what happens around me. However, I need to travel slowly and I avoid plane trips. A photographer must not run but walk, tirelessly. Then he can seize what is on offer on the pavement, at the street corner, in life."

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

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“I’m this little guy who walked around on this earth trying to find the place where pictures are waiting for him”

 

~ Josef Koudelka

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“New York is a city I loved, a city that forgives nothing but accepts everyone - a place of a thousand moods and vistas, of countless faces in a moving crowd, each one silently talking to you”

 

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

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“The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides. True beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It’s the care she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows and the beauty of a woman only grows with every passing year”

~ Audrey Hepburn

“I never considered giving up on my dreams. You could say I had an invincible optimism"

~ Tina Turner(1939-2023)

“A photographic session is a joint interpersonal exchange, a kind of creative encounter session at a high level of intensity. For me, photography is more a process of creating an experience than one of looking for pictures”

~ Norman Seeff

“The pictures do not ask you to help these people but something more difficult.. to be briefly, intricately aware of their existence, an existence as real and significant as your own”

~ Danny Lyon

“The images and articles presented in Vogue reflected the interests of the modern woman and influenced her choices regarding where to shop and what to wear”

~ George Hoyningen-Huene

“Huene was a genius. The master of us all”

~ Richard Avedon

“Jazz is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”

 

~ Duke Ellington

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"When photography is good, it’s pretty interesting and when it is very good it is irrational and even magical…..nothing to do with the photographer’s conscious will or desire. When the photograph happens, it comes easily, as a gift that should not be questioned or analyzed."

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

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"This is a straight positive photograph of light slowed down by air movement and friction. A tiny light was suspended from the ceiling of the darkroom above an exposed piece of film. The design was caused by gravitation slowing down the light after the light was given a single push…."

~ Wynn Bullock

 

"My father wrote the above words on the back of a mounted print of this photograph of light. It is one of 18 images featured in the beautifully handcrafted 2017 publication of Relativity: Wynn Bullock and Albert Einstein. In his introductory essay, editor Collier Brown wrote: “In this book, 21st Editions presents two great twentieth-century thinkers, one a scientist, one an artist, but both on the same quest to perceive reality beyond the limitations of the senses. Behind both men’s work lies a kindred imagination…." Dad was fascinated by how the universe worked and photography was his way of probing its mysteries. In Gravitation Acceleration, 1950, physics and art come together in a stunningly elegant, graceful dance. "

~ Barbara Bullock-Wilson

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