Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera len...s and the eye both register images--because of their sensitivity to light--at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over... the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not bedding, but a "relationship," is what women seek. And in this difference it is impossible to fail to acknowledge a distinct s...uperiority of the feminine sensibility, however cantish this may sound. Whereas men are overwhelmed by the strong pulsations of the body, women remain free to bestow a wider meaning to the corporeal elements of the erotic. The erotic does not end in spastic contractions and reflex discharges; it transcends them, to reach into the ethereal realms of memory and feeling, like a note that reverberates long after the string has pulsated. Woman may resort to her body in ways congruous with her aims and in a fashion is apt to be ranked as "manipulative." But only when she is long remembered and continually desired, as if by a cyclically renewed, ever kindled thirst; only when her image fills to capacity the consciousness of the man she has chosen, and stretches temporally beyond the meager boundaries of physiologic immediacy; only then does she claim to have won. When her immanent presence projects across time and space to leave a profound impress on another being: then she has "scored."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all.... I am not quite sure whether I... am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The places we have known do not only belong to the world of space in which we situate them for the sake of simplicity. They were b...ut a thin slice between contiguous impression which formed our lives back then; the memory of a certain image is but the regret of a certain instant; and the houses, the roads, the avenues are fleeting, alas! as the years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigge...r and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera--and himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself beco...mes not a power but an image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is... created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded ho...pe, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »