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

• Words of wisdom for every photographer: “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.” So said Goethe.

poetry and photography are similar in that more people do it than appreciate it. Good point.

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

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

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

At a family dinner, the cook cut off the ends of the ham before putting it in the oven. “Why did you do that?,” asked a guest. “I always have, because my mother always did it,” said the cook, “Go ask her.” The mother answered, “I cut off the ends because my mother did, so go ask her.” The grandmother answered, “I cut off the ends because I did not

• 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.

Pictorialism, with a small “p” always has been an essential element in the best photographs throughout the medium’s history. And it is still true. It acknowledges that photography is a PICTURE-making process. Pictures are very good at emphasizing feeling; they are very bad at conveying ideas. Ideas need words. If the words or ideas already exist, t

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.”

“Unless we know living things, how will we come to love them? Unless we learn to love them, we will not have the will to conserve, protect, or sustain them. And, to complete the argument, without them we will not exist.”