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

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.”

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

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.”

As Bernard Bailey remarked, “When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed they are not it.”

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

What I want to know — and I think this is very important because it is at the heart of almost all art education in this country — is there any empirical, verifiable evidence that art education creates “better” human beings or “improves” our culture? If not, then this accepted value of art constitutes merely a cultural belief system and the art-is-g

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

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.”