#Portrait

“The maestro’s villa was a photographer’s nightmare, with his boisterous children bicycling through vast rooms already crowded with canvases. I eagerly accepted Picasso’s alternate suggestion to meet later in Vallauris at his ceramics gallery. “He will never be here” the gallery owner commented, when my assistant and two hundred pounds of equipment arrived. “He says the same thing to every photographer”. To everyone’s amazement the “old lion” not only kept his appointment with me but was prompt and wore a new shirt. He could partially view himself in my large format lens and intuitively moved to complete the composition”

 

~ Yousuf Karsh
(1908-2002)

“For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography”

~ Pablo Picasso
(1881-1973)

“Today people talk a lot about “reading” a photograph. That means getting it, understanding what it’s all about. But man, when it comes to Herman Leonard, I think a better word is “listen”. You need to “listen” to Herman's pictures. They are full of music and you can hear it”

~ Quincy Jones
(Quoted in the book “Listen: Herman Leonard and his World of Jazz”- 21st Editions)

“For some people the word “elegance” has acquired objectionable, snobbish connotations. But I myself prefer to regard elegance as an attractive and admirable - if admittedly rare - human attribute: a form of physical and mental grace that has nothing to do with pretension or over refinement or an excess of money to spend. Unlike Huene, who had absorbed an infallible sense of elegance from his upbringing, I had to invent it on my own: more exactly, to learn gradually to recognize elegance in others and try to portray it in my photographs.”

~ Horst P Horst

“Today music is visual”

~ Archie Shepp

"When you're observant, inspiration can show up in the most unusual places, triggering a new idea to appear.”

~ Noell Oszvald

“I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you,
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you, bend to you,
and the measure of my changing love for you,
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume my heart with its cruel ray,
stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who dies,
The only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.”

~ Pablo Neruda
(Sonnet LXVI: I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You)

“Pictures have to do with heart and mind and eye and they have to communicate and as long as they do that it’s valid”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

“Dogs have more to do than children. For one thing, they are focused to lead a life that is really schizoid. Every minute, they have to be on two planes at once, juggling the dog world against the human world. And they’re always on call. Their owners want instant affection everyday, any time of day. A dog can never say that he has other things to do. He can never have a headache, like a wife.”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

"The world is as good as you are. You've got to learn to like yourself first."

~ Steve McQueen
(1930-1980)

“Although she seems uncertain, her understanding of what would make her a movies star was so great. The need also was so great. The intelligence was there too. She created Marilyn. She created that character, it wasn’t the movies that did it. She did it. She had much more control with a still camera than in the movies. We would discuss what we were going to do and then we would play. We used to laugh a lot. It was great.
Neither one of us knew what we were doing and that was a bond between us. Secondly, I was not a threat to her. I had six sessions with her. The shortest was two hours which was a press event, and the longest was two months on the set of “The Misfits”. Her enemy was that she couldn’t sleep, so she would take sleeping tablets. I saw an enormous change in her over the ten years that I photographed her. In that time she had gone from a beginner to a world figure and it had taken its toll. She created “Marilyn Monroe” but it was very hard on her. To my knowledge as long as she could fantasize about being a movie star she was fine. It was when the fantasy became the reality that it was hard”

 

~ Eve Arnold
(1912 - 2012)

“A nice girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none”

~ Marilyn Monroe
(1926 - 1962)

 

"Jacques is the most meticulous person I know. He spent 2 hours taking the old bicycle to pieces. He has the same patience with every kind of mechanism. A gag is just another piece of clockwork”

 

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

“The images are designed so that after you see the picture 2 or 3 times, it’s no longer my film. It starts to be your film. You recognize the people, you know them and you don’t even know who directed the picture. “Play Time” is nobody.

 

~ Jacques Tati
(1907-1982)

“On April 4, 1968 amidst rising racial tension, Martin Luther King Jr, was shot while the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis,Tennessee. America was shocked, stunned and again pitched into the nightmare of violent death and public agony, not five years after President John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. I was nearby and flew to Memphis and then on to Atlanta to cover the funeral. Arriving in advance of the plane that was carrying the body of the slain civil rights leader, I moved out of the photographers’ allotted area on the tarmac for a moment and caught one frame of his widow, Coretta Scott King and their children as they prepared to step down from the plane. Crowds lined up outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to quietly view the casket and pay tribute to the slain leader.”

~ Harry Benson

“Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation”

~ Coretta Scott King
(1927 - 2006)

“It was 3.00am after a concert at the Olympia in Paris in January 1964. They had so much pent-up energy after a performance, and they really couldn’t go out because they would be mobbed. So we were sitting around talking and drinking. Their manager, Brian Epstein burst into their suite at the George V Hotel to tell them, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was number one on the American charts, which meant they were going to America to be on The Ed Sullivan Show. That also meant I was going to America with them and I was pleased. America had always fascinated me. Ever since I was a boy in Glasgow watching James Cagney gang movies, I knew that was where I wanted to be.

They were excited about having a number -one hit in America. I had heard the Beatles talking about a pillow fight they had had a few nights before, so I suggested it. I thought it would make a good photo to celebrate. At first they said okay, but then John said, no, it would make them look silly, so that was that. Then John slipped up behind Paul and hit him over the head with a pillow, spilling his drink, and that started it."

~ Harry Benson

“It is absolutely clear we need to recognize the universality of human rights, the indivisibility of human rights and we need to find a new energy that motivates young people around the world.”

~ Volker Tucker (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights)

 

“It is in your hands to make a better world for all who live in it”

~ Nelson Mandela

“Only the photographer, himself or herself, knows the effects he or she wants. They should know by instinct, grounded in experience what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft light or by dark treatment”

~ Bill Brandt (1904 - 1983)

 

“I believe in deeply ordered chaos”

~ Francis Bacon, Painter (1909-1992)

“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

“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)

“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

"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.

Taking up photography at the age of 40 years old, urged on by her children as an antidote to her husband leaving to run the family plantations in India, Julia Margaret Cameron became the first great female photographer. It is so hard to find her prints in such perfect condition as this one. I had collected several in the past in not so great a condition but it was always a dream to find a 10. My dream came true with this one and it just transports me to a special pace each time I look at it.

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”.