Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
I always said “yes” to everything.
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.”
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.
If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won’t make you cry.
If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.
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.
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.
What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.
