Looking for Quotes

[Don Boyd]

One of the things that has attracted me to large format photography is that it seems to attract a disproportionately large number of philosophers and seekers. (It is O.K. to admit it here, we are all in on the secret.) Folks on this forum seem to always be trying to answer the question, "What is the meaning of life?", or, "What is the experience of life as told by my fumbling with film or sensor."

So, as I contemplate beginning a photographic book project on, The Landscape of Place and Being, I thought I would enlist the help of all you other thinkers, readers, meditators and Walt Whitman loafers. You can assist me by sharing any quotes, or short reflections, yours or others, that might accompany such images in a book. My current thinking is that the text accompanying the images will not be there to explain the images, but to join with them synergistically, each bringing more texture and depth to the other. Something along the lines that John Daido Loori did in, Making Love with Light.

It would assist me greatly if you would cite the author and, if possible, the source. If you share something of your own, I will attempt to contact you at the email address on line for this forum for explicit permission and citation information before publishing. If you would like to send me contact information off-line, that would be even better. Like most of you, I have a day job to support this glorious obsession and therefore consider this a long term project.

So, feel free to help by adding to this thread. As a catalyst, here are a few that I have already collected. Some may be too lengthy to use entirely, but you never know . . .

William James,

"Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. His preeminence over them is simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants – physical, moral, esthetic and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself so inexpungably in the necessary. And from the consciousness of this, he should draw the lesson that his wants are to be trusted. That even when their gratification seems farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present powers of reckoning. Prime down his extravagance, sober him – and you undo him."

This classic by John Barrett Browning,

"But a man's reach should exceed his grasp/Else what's a heaven for?"

This one is from forum member Tim Atherton's wonderful blog, http://photo-muse.blogspot.com/. (I apologize for its length but when I first read it, I felt like I was walking through the Bosque with Fernando behind me, whispering. I just couldn't see what to leave out from Tim's selections of Pessoa's work)

Fernando Pessoa

extracts from: "The Keeper of Sheep" and other writings by Fernando Pessoa

When I look, I see clear as a sunflower.
I'm always walking the roads
Looking right and left,
And sometimes looking behind . . .
And what I see every second
Is something I've never seen before,
And I know how to do this very well . . .
I know how to have the essential astonishment
That a child would have if it could really see
It was being born when it was being born . . .
I feel myself being born in each moment,
In the eternal newness of the world . . .
I believe in the world like I believe in a marigold,
Because I see it. But I don't think about it
Because to think is to not understand . . .
The world wasn't made for us to think about
(To think is to be sick in the eyes)
But for us to see and agree with . . .
I don't have a philosophy: I have senses . . .
If I talk about Nature, it's not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that's why I love it,
Because when you love you never know what you love,
Or why you love, or what love is . . .
Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not thinking . . .

~

If I could crush the whole earth
And be able to feel its taste,
Happier in a moment I'd be.
But every now and again we need to be unhappy
So we can be natural...

Not everything is sunny days,
And rain, when long overdue, is much needed.
For this reason I take unhappiness with happiness,
Naturally, like one who is not surprised to find
Mountains and planes
Rock cliffs and grass...

What is needed is to be able to be natural and calm
Both in happiness and unhappiness,
To feel like one looks,
To think like one walks,
And when the time to die comes,
To remember that the day also dies,
And that the sunset is beautiful
And beautiful is the night that stays behind...
That is how it is and shall be...

~

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it's hard to explain to anyone
how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough
simply to exist

[Walter Calahan]

Here's a quote.

From a sheriff deputy in Louisianna when I was under my darkcloth composing an image. The darkcloth is black on the inside and white on the outside. He was standing in front of my camera preventing me from taking a picture.

Quote "Boy, don't you know this is Klan country?"

[Vaughn]

"When I first looked at Walker Evan's photographs I thought of something Malraux wrote: 'To transform destiny into awareness.' One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But, how else are you going to justify your failure and your effort?"

Robert Frank

[John Kasaian]

"The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms." ---G.K. Chesterton,1909

"By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece."---G.K. Chesterton.

[Struan Gray]

If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain'd


If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness;
Let us find out, if we must be constrain'd,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of poesy;
Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd
By ear industrious, and attention meet:
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.

John Keats

[Hugo Zhang]

"The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. "

"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. "

Marcel Proust

[Keith Pitman]

CHEKOV

If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

[Alan Davenport]

I was going to give you the quote here, but I decided that would spoil it for those who haven't already seen the promo for J. Brunner's Introduction to Large Format Photography.

View it HERE. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a64iG-A-cRI)

[Jim Rhoades]

Tillman Crane:

"You can never own to many Deardorffs"

[Keith Pitman]

VICTOR HAVEL
I think that every genuine work of art has some mystery in it, though this may be only in its structure, in the secret of its composition, the touch, the clash, the lack of clash, among the forms, in the mystery of those structural events. Every work of art points somewhere beyond itself; it transcends itself and its author; it creates a special force field around itself that moves the human mind and the human nervous system in a way that its author could scarcely have planned ahead of time. It is impossible to number the rays that emanate from it, and no one can see where they end. They grow weaker, of course, but they carry on to infinity.

[Anupam]

"Art isn't about ideas. Its about style. The most crucial career decision is picking a good 'ism' so everyone knows how to categorise you without understanding the work. I'm a suburban post-modernist. I was going to be a neo-decontructivist but mom wouldn't let me."
-Calvin

"People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world."
-Calvin

"Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some people just act on any whim that enters their head. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles"
-Calvin

[Don Boyd]

Thank you to all of the posters. Here is another to keep the flow going:

I am an artist. What that word implies is looking for something all the time and never finding it in full.
Vincent Van Gogh

[cyrus]

I resolve daily that at dusk I shall repent
For a night with a cup full of wine spent.
In the presence of flowers, my resolve simply went
In such company, my only regret is to repent
- Omar Khayyam (Persian mathematician, astronomer, poet)

....oh wait, that was about wine and women not photography...

Ok how about one about passing time:

O friend, for tomrrow let us not worry
This moment we have now; let us not hurry.
(same fella)

Or my current favourite:

Who are you and where do you come from
that these dark blue skies
gaze down upon you
with a thousand starry eyes.
(Iqbal)

[Keith Pitman]

Natalie Lileks

"All of my mistakes are giving me ideas."

[Brian C. Miller]

I was going to give you the quote here, but I decided that would spoil it for those who haven't already seen the promo for J. Brunner's Introduction to Large Format Photography.
Is that clip CSI or the X-Files??? :eek:

Love the quote at the end, though.

[domenico Foschi]

No Great Artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an Artist.

O. Wilde

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.
She is not to be judged by any external standards of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forest know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the form more real than living man, and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no law, no uniformity.

O. Wilde


Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life imitative instincts, but from ithe fact that the self-conscious aim in Life is to find expression, and that Art offers certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy. It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but it is extremely frui9tful, and throws an entirely new light upon the history of Art.
It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates Art. The only effects she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings. This is the secret of Nature's charm, as well the explanation of nature's weakness.
....Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
O/ Wilde

[Caroline Matthews]

Pohl's Law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere,
will not hate it.

[Caroline Matthews]

Especially me!

[Keith Pitman]

"The test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

[Mark Sawyer]

"Oh, look... Photons!"

[Ben Calwell]

Ben Calwell:
"The sun smiles and shows me a chiseled landscape, so why oh why didn't I close the shutter before pulling the dark slide."

[GPS]

You could find a mountain (even a fountain) of them in this forum. I'm tempted to cite a few of them that I remember but I think the authors would take it too personally...

[kmack]

From: the song of mehitabel
By Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927

the things that i had not ought to
i do because i ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai

[Preston]

"People don't watch enough. They think. It's not the same thing."
Henri Cartier-Bresson

"To be able to really see, one must not only open one's eyes. One must, above all, open one's heart"
Gaston Rebuffat-French Alpinist

[Don Boyd]

Here is one that I have saved from time PP (pre-photography). It has new meaning for me now. I started to substitue words that I might use to give it a more photographic intention, but decided to leave the editing to you:

Rules for Being Human
1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error and experimentation. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately work.
4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in vaious forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. Ther is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. "There" is no better place than "here." When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will, again, look better than "here."
7. Others are merely a mirror of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life's questions lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust.
10. You will forget all of this.

- Found on a regrigerator in Toronto

[Mark Sampson]

As a student in the late '70s, I had a textbook called "Perceptual Quotes for Photographers", or something like that. I think it was written, or compiled, by Dr. Richard Zakia of RIT. I doubt I still have my copy, (and it's probably long out of print,) but it would be worth looking up.

[Don Boyd]

Mark, thanks for the citation. I have found a used copy of the book, "Perceptual Quotes for Photograpohers" by Zakia online, and have already ordered a copy.

[matthew blais]

my "signature" quote:

[Randy H]

Ran across an old list of quotes that I had and thought I would revive this poor old thread.

The first is attributed to Saint Ansel:
"Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships"

"The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic" -Dick Bogarde

"You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus" -Mark Twain

I have dozens more, but this last is my favourite.
"Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again" -Henri Cartier-Bresson

And remember. "... The real skill of photography is organized visual lying." -Terence Donovan

[claudiocambon]

"There are no accidents, only gifts." - Minor White

"Photographs do not lie, but liars may photograph." - Lewis Hine

"I photograph to see what things look like photographed." - Garry Winogrand

Upon hearing someone remark, "Life is strange...", Winogrand is supposed to have quipped, "Compared to what?"

"Most photographers follow their eyes, but I follow my nose." - Robert Frank

"Never forget that you're all just a bunch of thieving masturbators!" - Thomas Roma (shouted to an undergrad intro photo class at Yale a few years back)

[Don Boyd]

O.K., here's one that was written just for us by Peter Matthiessen:

Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day . . . we become seekers.

There probably isn't one of us that hasn't felt that pain, and it is so bad that we continually look for it.

[Hugo Zhang]

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost." _Gustave Flaubert

[Duane Polcou]

"I don't know why people talk about photography so much. I just go ahead and do it."
- Brett Weston

[Maris Rusis]

"It is good to be open-minded but not so open-minded that one's brains fall out." Bertrand Russell.

[Randy H]

"As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government." -- Dave Barry

And on a lighter note:

"Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye if the beholder" -- Dr Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull

"A seven bath developer is no substitute for thought" -- Terence Donovan

[Hugo Zhang]

"Close your eyes and see." -Stephen Dedalus.