Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex ...about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a reportorial quality in Hemingway's work that is absent from Fitzgerald's fiction. Hemingway's technique--in his early w...ork, at least--was to let the observed detail convey emotion with no authorial analysis. Fitzgerald was more concerned with evoking and analyzing the feeling of an experience than with recording detail. As he advised his daughter, "But when in a freak moment you will want to give the low-down, not the scandal, not the merely reported but the profound essence of what happened at a prom or after it, perhaps that honesty will come to you--and then you will understand how it is possible to make even a forlorn Laplander feel the importance of a trip to Cartier's!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film... studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief.... Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol--pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts ...have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, ...I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparen...ts' memories on special occasions perhaps--no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes and never forgetting, recording by thousands,... the skull with its brains like eels the tablet of the world the bones and their joints that build and break for any trick....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He shall not die, by G--, cried my uncle Toby. MThe ACCUSING SPIRIT which flew up to heaven's chancery with the oath, blush'...d as he gave it in;--and the RECORDING ANGEL as he wrote it down, dropp'd a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not truly... cumulative treasure; where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is,--I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Write while the heat is in you.... The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a ...hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »