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Dendranthema grandiflorum
Tachihara4x5 Fujinon150mmF5.6 Neopan100Acros

Favorite quotes:

Susan Sontag -- "ON PHOTOGRAPHY"

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virture of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's(or thing's)mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Diane Arbus -- "An Aperture Monograph"

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats......For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. I do have a feeling he print but I don't have a holy feeling for it. I really think what it is, is what it's about. I mean it has to be of something. And what it's of is always more remarkable than what it is.

Richard Avedon -- "Foreword to In The American West"

I use an 8 x 10 view camera on a tripod, not unlike the camera used by Curtis, Brady, or Sander, except for the speed of the shutter and film. I stand next to the camera, not behind it, several inches to the left of the lens and about four feet from the subject. As I work I must imagine the pictures I am taking because, since I do not look through the lens, I never see precisely what the film records until the print is made. I am close enough to touch the subject and there is nothing between us except what happens as we observe one another during the making of the portrait. This exchange involves manipulations, submissions. Assumptions are reached and acted upon that could seldom be made with impunity in ordinary life.

Irving Penn -- "World in a Small Room"

The Angels were something else again. They were like coiled springs ready to fly loose and make trouble. Being inside a building with their precious bikes (and the wives and children I had asked them bring) frustraited their natural tendency to smash up the place and do mischief. The delays and provocations were endless. Still, the hypnotic lens of the camera and the confinement of the studio held them in check long enough for the pictures to be made. When the experience was over and their screaming bikes went down the road, I breathed my deepest sign.

Robert Capa -- "Slightly Out of Focus"

Next morning, after sleeping it over, I felt better. While shaving, I held a conversation with myself about the incompatibility of being a reporter and hanging on to a tender soul at the same time. The pictures of the guys sitting around the airfield without the pictures of their being hurt and killed would have given the wrong impression. The pictures of the dead and wounded were the ones that would show the real aspect of war, and I was glad I had taken that roll before I turned soppy.

Ara Güler -- "A Photographical Sketch on Lost Istanbul"

People of my own and previous generations will never again be able to pass in front of garden gates covered with purple Judas-Tree blossoms. They will never again be able to walk down cobbed Bosphorus streets, slippery atter rain. Never again will they be follwed from the top of a wall by the bright, suspicious gaze of one of the tabby cats that we used to encouter so frequently in the old Istanbul streets and which would suddenly dash off miaowing in front of you.

Charis Wilson -- "EDWARD WESTON NUDES"

Edward and I both agreed with the view of a Greek friend of ours, Jean Varda, who was fond of saying there were three perfect shapes in the world .... the hull of a boat, a violin and a woman's body. The probrem for a photographer who deals in sharp, unmanipulated images is that he cannot simplify a face, or generalize it into a type, as a painter or sculptor can. If the full face appears, the picture is inevitably the portrait of a particular individual and the expression of the face will dictate the viewer's response to the body. If a photographer wants to make a nude, rather than a nude portrait, he has only three possible options: the face must be averted, minimized by distance, or excluded.