Who Said That?

While recently digging through my collection of books by and about

photographers, I ran across a lot of interesting, entertaining, and often

unexpected quotes. I thought it might be fun to see how many of the following

quotes you can match to the proper author.

 

Those quoted are Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Jerry Uelsmann,

George Bernard Shaw, Weegee, Robert Frank, W. Eugene Smith, Walker Evans, and

Charles Baudelaire.

 

1. I had thirty-two operations on my mouth and nose alone. The shell had

entered my head over the roof of my mouth and nearly cut off my tongue and took

all the bone structure out of it. Part of the shell is still lodged a fraction

of an inch from my spine. I was also hit in the hand, arm, leg, and chest. I

really didn't know whether I was ever going to be able to photogrpah again. My

first thought when I was wounded was that I still had music. When I managed to

get my eyes open (I didn't know my glasses had exploded into my face and that

some glass had gone into my eye), I saw a blurred sky, and I said to myself

that I still had photogrpahy. The third thing I thought was that I wanted to

use a camera and photograph what was happening. Not because it was me, but

because it was a picture that was important to me.

 

2. [Answering the question "How did you come upon those images?"] ... by

instinct, like a bird, entirely by instinct. Like a squirrrel too, burying and

hiding, and devining where the nuts are. I've been doing that all the time. But

I find it inhibiting to discuss this. It suggests speculation, and doubt; doubt

of my own sure action......It's as though there's a wonderful secret in a

certain place and I can capture it. Only I can do it at this moment, only this

moment and only me. That's a hell of a thing to believe, but I believe it or I

couldn't act.

 

3. I should find a new place to work: the excitement over new subject matter is

no longer there. Not that I have done everything, or even done as well as could

be, many things already worked with - but that necessary thrill of discovery,

amazement over new material, I no longer have.

 

4. When I first looked at Walker Evans' photographs, I thought of something

Malraux wrote; 'To transform destiny into awareness.' One is embarrassed to

want so much for oneself. But, how else are you going to justify your failure

and your effort?

 

5. Are we to suppose that a people whose eyes are growing used to considering

the results of a material science as though they were the products of the

beautiful, will not in the course of time have singularly diminished its

faculties of judging and of feeling what are among the most ethereal and

immaterial aspects of creation?

 

6. Now all the papers and syndicates offered me jobs. I told them not to be

insulting; I intended to remain a free soul.

 

7. My hand camera negatives are all made with the express purpose of

enlargement, and it is but rarely that I use more than part of the original

shot.

 

8. I remember seeing, last year a color photograph of a cauliflower which will

haunt me to my grave, so very nearly right, and consequentlhy, so very

exquisitely wrong was it. I was accustomed to cheerfully and flagrantly

impossible groups of a strawberry, a bunch of grapes, a champagne bottle and a

butterfly, remote alike from nature and from art. But this confounded

cauliflower was like Don Quixote's wits: it was just the millionth of a

millimieter off the mark and hence acquired a subtle impressiveness, the effect

in the cauliflower's case being disquietingly baleful, as if the all but

healthy green of the vegetable had been touched by the poison of tthe Borgias.

 

9. Truly "accidental" photograph is practically non-existent; with pre-

conditioned attitudes, we recognize and are arrested by the significant moment.

 

10. ... when I went to a museum with a friend - and the one that I go to most

frequently is the Museum of Modern Art - as long as we were together we would

say the most trivial things to each other, things like "Oh there's a

Picasso," "There's a Klee." We would be flaunting a sort of naive knowledge,

and it occurred to me there was great pressure somehow to verbalize, to say "

That's interesting, that's right" - this kind of thing. And so I have learned

that when I go to a museum now I go alone to the things that I want to look at.

I relate to them as best I can visually; sometimes their are things about them

that I share verbally with people; sometimes there are things that I can't

share.

 

-Julie

 

"...we would say the most trivial things to each other...We would be flaunting a sort of naive knowledge, and it occurred to me there was great pressure somehow to verbalize, to say " That's interesting, that's right"

 

That's interesting. That's right.

First one is W. Eugene Smith when he was wounded on Okinawa.

Number 6 was Weegee, I let others decide who were the other quotes were from.

Michael Ging; both correct. W. Eugene Smith's was easy but I though the Weegee one might take a minute or two, though I guess he couldn't really go with any of the other quotes.

 

Here are two more that were too long for the original post. I'll give identity of the speakers; first is by James Thurber and the second is from a person you wouldn't know (L. E Chittenden), but I like his story.

 

1. .... it would be unfair to say that all art photographers have gone in for such bizarre compositions; many of them are content to lie on the floor and photograph people or get up on stepladders and photograph people. It all comes to the same thing, however: it is virtually impossible nowadays to find a straightaway photograph of a person standing and looking at the camera.

 

Personally, I don't care how many strange photographs are taken and exhibited. All that worries me (and this is always true of me during any trend, from art photography to proletarianism) is what is going to happen to ME. I like to be photographed and I come from a long line of ancestors who liked to be photographed.

 

My grandfather Fisher liked to be photographed so well that we have one old Fisher family album in which there is nothing but photographs of my grandfather. In not one of them, however is he shown lying on his back with a dahlia in his mouth or lying on his side with shadows on his face cast by the wire netting of a chicken coop. I don't think he would have submitted to any such poses, and he was man enough to have successfully fought off any photographer who might have wanted to throw him to the floor or trap him into lying down on the floor. Grandfather's black beard would, I suppose have looked terribly effective photographed between a vase and a wastebasket, but there is no man alive who could have persuaded him to try and find out.

 

2. I can call to mind how the Daguerreotyper fixed my head in a brazen vice, and having reduced me thereby to the verge of discomfort, maliciously told me to keep my eyes steadily fixed on a paper pinned against the wall, and to think of something pleasant.

 

I can well remember how the Daguerreotyper thereupon left me, and how I, feeling exceedingly uncomfortable, and being lamentably ignorant that the operation had commenced, released my head from the vice and promenaded the room for some ten minutes, admiring the various designs in the chimney pots which are usually to be studied with advantage from a Daguerreotype studio. Then, hearing the sound of returning steps, I mounted my platform, and resumed my seat and vice.

 

I can call to mind MY dismay when the Daguerreotyper took the plate out of the camera and HIS dismay, when, on the development of the picture, he found that it merely contained a representation of the chair-back and vice.

#9 is Ansel Adams.

10; Uelsmann

#3 is Weston..

Steven Nelson, correct.

 

Ellis Vener correct. Uelsmann says some really interesting stuff.

 

David Lee, correct - he was talking about Point Lobos.

 

I'll give a hint on Charles Baudelaire; he despised photography.

I can't stand it when photographers say things.

 

Keith

I couldn't guess who said what, but I did find this one of the best postings ever on this site. BRAVO!

"I couldn't guess who said what, but I did find this one of the best postings ever on this site. BRAVO!"

 

The photographic equivalent of "Trivial Pursuit" is "one of the best postings ever? My, you have a low threshold for "best."

It is damn exciting compared to most discussions in this forum.

 

 

 

5 is Baudelaire

Steve -- You clearly missed my point. The value of the posting is not in the game itself, it is in the quotes, which are much more interesting than most of the postings that make it to this site.

David Schwartz, thanks, and, I thought the same thing. The quotes were interesting to me. Making their ID a mystery may have been a mistake; I thought it might make one spend more time considering the content of the quote.

 

Don E, you are correct. The entire Baudelaire essay was a broadside against the idea of pictures made by machine. Shows that otherwise reasonable and smart people can sometimes be curmudgeons (as is the case with many of the participants in this forum).

 

The remaining unidentified quotes are probably too hard, though I think the George Bernard Shaw one kind of sticks out. The unlikeliness of them is why I picked them.

 

Number 2 is Walker Evans.

 

Number 4 is Robert Frank.

 

Number 8 is George Bernard Shaw.

 

Number 7 is Alfred Stieglitz - whom most people believe never cropped his images.

 

Thanks to everybody who enjoyed the quotes and apologies to those who did not.

 

-Julie

"...we would say the most trivial things to each other...We would be flaunting a sort of naive knowledge, and it occurred to me there was great pressure somehow to verbalize, to say " That's interesting, that's right"

 

That's interesting. That's right.