Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
I always said “yes” to everything.
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I never look for a photograph. The photograph finds me and says, “I'm here!” and I say, “Yes, I see you. I hear you.”
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Fall in love. Every day. With everything. With life. If you can fall in love, you can be a photographer. I think that is absolutely essential.
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If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won’t make you cry.
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If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.
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It is my aim to transform the complexities of the figure into harmonies of simplified form revealing the innate reality, the life force, the spirit, the inherent symbolism.
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Often I have struggled for days to get the image of the photograph to overlap the spirit I see. It is an awesome responsibility, and a lonely one.
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What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.
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