I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term--meaning that the creation of a simple photo...graph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching--there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same la...w with the system, with time, and all that is made ... and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them--Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles--appe...ar to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing by a wild beast!--between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealousy, and the king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen as his examples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lapse of ages changes all things--time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing "abo...ut, around, and underneath" man, except man himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to po...or suffering humanity than anything else that has "cast up" in my time or is like to--this art by which even the "poor" can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is important to realize that determinism does not imply events occur in spite of our actions. Some events occur because we dete...rmine them. Determinism must not be confused with the doctrine of fatalism, which asserts that future events are entirely beyond our control. "It is all written in the stars," declares the fatalist. "What will be will be." The soldier who behaves recklessly on the battlefield in the face of a hail of bullets while thinking "if my number is on it, no precaution will avert death" is a fatalist. Some Oriental religions contain fatalist overtones, and many people are inclined to lapse into fatalism from time to time, especially as far as major world affairs are concerned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photogr...aphy is organised visual lying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now the hand-painted image of a person is costly because the time of a well-trained artist is required to make it. The time spent ...by the painter is time spent seeing as well as making. Literally thousands of separate perceptions must be consolidated into a single image by the portrait painter. Even where the style is naturalistic and the technique meticulous, the necessary process of amalgamation entails synthesis, generalization, exag geration, and simplification. Hence, much as we admire the painter's craft, we know that it changes optical data. The invention and perfection of photography has taught us to see how painters change what they see. Oddly enough, we are less conscious of the fact that the camera also changes reality. Beyond that, most of us do not realize how much the photographer manipulates what the camera sees because we have been thoroughly conditioned to believe in the photographer's--as opposed to the painter's--mode of representing reality. For practical purposes this means that we regard photographic imagery as truthful while painterly imagery is viewed, at best, as poetic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »