Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
When I first became interested in photography... my idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth and also as naïve as a tender plant.
I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself—mysterious and ever-changing light with its accompanying shadows rich and full of mystery.
If it were possible for any one person or group of persons to go through a photographic finishing plant’s work at the end of a day, you could probably pull out the most extraordinary photographic exhibition we've ever seen. On almost any subject. The trouble is to find the things.
Dangerously close to snapshots but have collective impact. Maybe show group in show. Buy 3 at $10 each.
(1961 note on Garry Winogrand photographs by Steichen, then director of photography at Museum of Modern Art, New York.)
The use of the term art medium is, to say the least misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium.
Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyone with a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while the artist working with any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only image-maker who begins with his picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.
Usefulness has always been attractive in the art of photography.
A portrait must get beyond the almost universal self-consciousness that people have before the camera. If at some moment of reality... did not happen, you had to provoke it in order to... awaken a genuine response.
