Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]
As I became aware that all things have unique spatial and temporal qualities which visually define and relate them, I began to perceive the things I was photographing not as objects but as events. Working to develop my skills of perceiving and symbolizing these event qualities, I discovered the principle of opposites. When, for example, I photographed the smooth, luminous body of a woman behind a dirty cobwebbed window, I found that the qualities of each event were enhanced and the universal forces which they manifested were more powerfully evoked.
A person is quite different from a tree or rock or stream. By introducing the nude into my pictures, I started perceiving all the things I was photographing in new ways. In contrast or opposition to each other, things became much more significant and interesting, revealing many more qualities than I had ever dreamed of knowing and expressing. By using the nude, I stopped thinking in terms of objects. I was seeing things, instead, as dynamic events, unique in their own beings yet also related and existing together within a universal context of energy and change.
Florence Thompson
[Migrant mother, b. 1904, Oklahoma, d. 1983, Scotts Valley, California.]
That’s my picture hanging all over the world, but I can’t get a penny out of it. What good’s it doing me?
(Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother at 75 years of age living in a trailer park near where the famous photograph was taken and surviving on $331.60 monthly social security.)
Sergei Tretyakov
[Writer, critic, and artist, b. 1892, Guldiga, Russia (now Kuldigas, Latvia), d. 1939, Moscow.]
Every young boy with a camera wages war against the easel painters, and every little reporter-factographer can turn his pen into a mortal weapon against literature.
(1928)
James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]
In the immediate world, everything is to be discerned... with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
Over three and a half million people have seen the exhibit; a million copies of the book,
The Family of Man, have gone all over the world... This is irrefutable proof that photography is a universal language; that it speaks to all people; that people are hungry for that kind of language. They are hungry for pictures that have meaning, a meaning they can understand.
Paul Strand
[Photographer, b. 1890, New York, d. 1976, Oregeval, France.]
We do not photograph some large conception of humanity, but rather go very deeply into a single person, and penetrate very deeply and derive a larger meaning. One person who has been studied very deeply and penetratingly can become all persons. Therefore, it seems to me, that art is very specific and not at all general.
Barbara Morgan
[Photographer, b. 1900, Buffalo, Kansas, d. 1992, North Tarrytown, New York.]
From pre-historic time, the human psyche has found inspiration in art expression, from cave paintings then—to film and photography now.
