Paul Simon
[Musician, b. 1941, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spyI said “Be careful his bowtie is really a camera”
Tom Waits
[Musician, b. 1949, Pomona, California, lives in Sonoma County, California.]
Sun come up it was blue and goldEver since I put your picture
In a frame.
Paul Caponigro
[Photographer, b. 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Cushing, Maine.]
Photography’s potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way. Raoul Hausmann
[Artist, b. 1886, Vienna, d. 1971, Limoges, France.]
Having invented the static, simultaneous and purely phonetic poem, the Dadaists applied the same principles to pictorial representation. They were the first to use photography as material to create, with the aid of structures that were very different, often anomalous and with antagonistic significance, a new entity which tore from the chaos of war and revolution an entirely new image; and they were aware that their method possessed a propaganda power which their contemporaries had not the courage to exploit...
(1931) E.E. Cummings
[Poet and author, b. 1894, Cambridge, Massachusetts, d. 1962, North Conway, New Hampshire.]
…i keptremembering how your mind looked when it slept
for several years, to wake up asking why.
So then you turned into a photograph
of somebody who’s trying not to laugh
at somebody who’s trying not to cry
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé—I think this is a true story—he says, “You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.” Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done. Richard Misrach
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in San Francisco.]
Probably the strongest criticism leveled at my work is that I’m making “poetry of the holocaust.” But I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas. It engages people when they might otherwise look away. Vladimir Nabokov
[Writer, b. 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia, d. 1977, Montreux, Switzerland.]
And by the striped mandirected at the sunny sand
blinked with a click of its black eyelid
the camera’s ocellus.
That bit of film imprinted
all it could catch,
the stirless child,
his radiant mother,
and a toy pail and two beach spades,
and some way off a bank of sand,
and I, the accidental spy,
I in the background have also been taken.
Next winter, in an unknown house,
grandmother will be shown an album,
and in that album there will be a snapshot,
and in that snapshot I shall be.
My likeness among strangers,
one of my August days,
my shade they never noticed,
my shade they stole in vain.
(1927)