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

” 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.”

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.”

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

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

• 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.

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.

the words of Groucho Marx: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”

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

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.”