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,

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.

So I ask you, again, what evidence exists that arts students become “better” human beings? Any one?

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.”

” 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.”

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

In the unlikely event that I would ever be invited to address the graduates, I would give the shortest speech on record: Dear Graduates, Find something you love to do. Get good at it. Hope, but don’t expect, others will appreciate it. Then, with luck, you might be able to make a living at it.

I wrote that I was often asked by students: “If you had to select just one name from the whole history of photography as representative of all that is wonderful about the medium, who would it be?” My answer was always: “Bill Brandt.”

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