LensWork #83 (The Bill Jay's Best of EndNotes issue)

• Beware of these two fallacies of photographic appreciation: 1) You like a photograph because you think/have been told that it is good. 2) You think a photograph is good because you like it.

So strange, so sad that Weegee, writing about Stieglitz, was predicting his own loneliness and decline into obscurity. But Weegee’s book does end on a bright note. Its final words are: “Be original and develop your own style, but don’t forget above anything and everything else…be human…think…feel. When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond bet

He was a gifted photographer, and I did not say thank you. That’s life, but it need not be.

Why, then, do I feel slightly uneasy at the disparity between the opulence of the book and the degradation of its subjects? Some questions have no easy answers, or, as Susan Sontag wrote: “The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”

In the ancient Greek world there was no need for contemplation. It was agreed. The greatest sin of all was hubris: an exaggerated pride which leads one to claim more than is one’s due.

As Woody Allen remarked, “We stand today at a crossroads: one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.”

These sights are ephemeral, fleeting treasures that have been offered to me and to me alone. No other person in the history of the world, anywhere in all of time and space, has been granted this gift to be here in my place. And I am privileged, through the camera, to take this moment away with me. That is why I photograph.”

The best paragraph in the whole issue was a story told by Ben Shahn, one of the most fascinating photographers to have worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. In search of a loan, a farmer was coldly rejected by a banker. In the face of the farmer’s pleas, the banker made him a “sporting offer,” recalled

As du Camp wrote, “The risk [of being honest] was great; but we could not let him continue this way, since at stake was a literary future in which we had absolute faith.”

” Levitt’s deadpan spunkiness emerges throughout the essay. She is a proud reporter, insisting on the exterior, matter-of-fact, impersonal quality of her work, writes Gopnik. But she refused to become a journalist. “A reporter,” according to Levitt, “says what she sees; a photojournalist sees what everyone else is saying.”