#C20th

“I had set up near a bakery at peak hour and after a few attempts, I was not sure I had the right image. Then I noticed a boy seriously counting his pennies while waiting for his turn and I explained to him what I needed from him. Exit the bakery in a hurry with the loaf held tilted under his left arm. The first attempt was too tense, the second was perfect. We went back into the bakery to eat a chocolate treat together"

~ Willy Ronis

“250 grams of magic and perfection in our daily lives. A French way of life. We had been fighting for years with bakers and the world of gastronomy for its recognition. The baguette is now a Unesco intangible heritage.”

~ Emmanuel Macron (President of France)

“My way of life, my very being is based on images capable of engraving themselves indelibly in our inner soul’s eye.”

~ Louis Stettner (1922 -2016)

“Light, gesture, gaze, movement, silence, tension, rest, rigor, relaxation. I would like to incorporate everything in this instant, to express the essence of humanity with the minimum of means”

 

~ Sabine Weiss

“I just get the will to do it. I don’t plan a photograph in advance… I work by impulse. No philosophy. No ideas. Not by the head but by the eyes. Eventually inspiration comes - instinct is the same as inspiration, and eventually it comes.”

 

~ Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexico, b. 1902-2002)

"For me photographs are taken in the eye before you've even thought what they mean. That's the reality I'm interested in capturing"

~ Daido Moriyama

"He is a magician with the camera, the camera being his magic eye."

~David Blochwitz

"It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about."

 

~ John Szarkowski
(1925-2007)

“People don’t understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it”

~ Billie Holiday

“I was merely a living witness. What does any good journalist do? Record what’s going on, observe the artist and their expressions, then leap in. You’ve got to react to something that’s happening or anticipate that it’s about to happen.”

 

~ Don Hunstein

“My work is inspired by my life. I express myself through my photographs. Everything that surrounds me provokes my feelings"

 

~ André Kertész (1895-1985)

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in it’s entirety. And the expression of what one feels should be set forth in terms of simple devotion to the medium - a statement of the utmost clarity and perfection possible under the conditions of creation and production”

~Ansel Adams
(1902-1984)

 

“Ansel Adams was one of the great photographers of this century. He was also one of the best loved spokespersons for the obligations we owe to the natural world. It has been easy to confuse the related but distinct achievements that earned him these twin honors. Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save. His great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world”

John Szarkowski
(1925 - 2007)

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm” ~Winston Churchill
(1874-1965)

“Churchill was arguably the most important man of the 20th Century and one of the reasons I wanted to become a photojournalist. This was Sir Winston’s last visit to his old school, Harrow. For the occasion students added a chorus to the school’s song...“And Churchill’s name shall win acclaim through each new generation."... It brought tears to his eyes. It was his last visit to the school.”

~Harry Benson

“The camera is an unsophisticated mechanical instrument which, like a mirror, reflects passively without a conscience. The artist must supply the conscience.”

~ Ralph Eugene Meatyard
(1925-1972)

“I think that a photograph to be strong has to recount some aspect of the human condition, enable us to feel the emotion that the photographer felt before her subject”

 

~ Sabine Weiss

“A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with their freedom”

~Bob Dylan (b. 1941)

Bruce is one of the great Magnum photographers best known for his gritty urban work. This is a rare gem in his archive. Full of wonderment, humanity and hope.

"I need to become completely anonymous if I’m to capture the essence, the root fact about the person and not merely their surface."

~Dan Budnik

Ansel Adams is justly celebrated for his epic depictions of majestic landscapes, but this rare, little discussed, haunting image of displaced children shows his profound empathy for humanity. Certainly on a par with his close colleague Dorothea Lange’s, “Migrant Mother”, certainly no less powerful.

I was visiting our great friend and artist, Pentti Sammallahti, in Helsinki and I casually said to him, “Perhaps there is another great photographer in Finland I should meet?”

This is my favorite Arnold Newman image. Such a great environmental portrait with a true sense of destiny as JFK looks to the future. Where is our leader now?

Wynn Bullock, to my mind, is one the greatest 20th Century photographers. Often eclipsed by his more well known contemporaries, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.  This is a haunting portrait of his mother’s hands taken in his modest house in Carmel in 1956. The beauty of the print just knocks me out and is the definition of the word “primal”.

Of course, “The Steerage” is one of the most celebrated images in the history of photography. For good reason as its' genius graphic construction and human empathy is utterly timeless.