QUOTES, INSPIRATION AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS

(and some words purely for their own sake)

Photographers don't play with your mind. It's an option they don't exercise.
I think photographers should be provocative and not tell you what you already know.
- Duane Michals

"One of the deepest pleasures in life is looking. Simply looking. Looking at streets, traffic,
faces, windows, shops, parks, churches, books, newspapers, and all the creatures and
creations of life itself. Instead of looking long and steadily, we tend to get brief, quick
looks at things before we hasten on, half-blind with purpose.
- Brendan Kennelly.

Everything we do is insignificant, but it is important that we do it.
- Mahatma Gandhi.

I don't believe in God, but women and trees are the proof of his existence. Photographic
representation is, alas, never faithful to the sentiment that triggered it, but imperfect as it is,
it is a naive attempt to postpone death, to steal from time a fall of light, a priviliged moment,
which will never again recur, but will continue to live thanks to the photograph - like those
stars that have been dead for thousands of years but whose light still travels through space
to show us what they were.
- Jeanloup Sieff.

I am suspicious of labels and rules, which soon become academies and prisons for any art form.
The only thing that matters is the final image and what it conveys.
- Arnold Newman

Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived.
- Wynn Bullock

Trust that little voice in your head that says "wouldn't it be interesting if...." And then do it.
You have to have the courage to take the first step, to take the first picture. Everything else is just noise.
- Duane Michals

The Bottom (May 1968)
A portrait is normally made by representing a face or a bust in a familiar or neutral
environment. The face is the most exposed, visible part of the body, the part most used
in social life. It has become a hypocritical mask which can be made to express whatever one
wishes; it can laugh in sadness, seem interested when frightfully bored, and remain impassive
while one seethes with passion. This is one reason why I began to be interested in bottoms.
For it is the most protected, the most secret part of the body, and retains a childish innocence
long since lost by gaze or hands. It is also, in plastic terms, the most moving (in woman, obviously),
all roundness and promise of better things. It is the bottom that remembers; it faces the past,
whereas we advance inexorably into the future. It looks back over the way that we have come,
like children propped on the back seat peering out over the receding stretch of road
as though careless of where they are going. Bottoms are as diverse as people; there are some that are
strictly functional, which serve only for sitting or crapping. These possess no interest
and often resemble the faces of their owners only too clearly.
Others are simply neutral, indeed neuter....in short, boring. Finally there are rare, elegant
and aristocratic bottoms that transcend their function, become works of art, masterpieces, miracles
of nature. They are the romanesque vaults of corporeal architecture, they restore one's
primitive faith in Woman as made in God's image. These are the bottoms I like to photograph, to
conserve for ever their miraculous curves before time brings them low. So unique are these
bottoms that they almost deserve to have no arsehole.
- Jeanloup Sieff.

The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.
- Terence Donovan

I like it when I do things that I haven't seen before.
- Igael Shemtov

One in the afternoon. I am on the terrace of the Cafe Flore. The place is full of strangers.
Spring sunshine, accordion player, the scent of American cigarettes, the murmur of conversations.
I imagine a cafe terrace in the 30s, the cafe life of the artists of that period, when they would turn up
about midday after long, noisy parties the night before. These people look as though they have all the
time in the world, whereas those whom I see at eight in the morning are hurrying to the office.
I see them all as merely reprieved from death; the artists of the 30s are all dead today. I am
surrounded by future corpses, beautiful young corpses, unaware of their own precarious hold
on life, thinking that they have eternity before them. For much of my life,
I watched pretty women go by in the streets wondering what their breasts were like, how copious their buttocks.
Today I imagine them as skeletons. I think of the skull beneath the skin, waiting patiently to appear within the
darkness of the tomb. The cemeteries are full of women passers-by whose long legs caught the eye
of the men sitting on the cafe terraces of the 30s.
- Jeanloup Sieff.

Wallow in your successes and learn from your mistakes.
- Bob Barnick.

The Cafe Flore is closed for the holidays, and I am on the terrace of the Deux Magots.
With each woman that passes, I live out a love affair, fleeting but complete. When I see them
some way off and their silhouette attracts me, our idyll begins. The closer they come,
the more I love them. At ten metres, it is passion, at six, painful jealousy, at four it's
unbearable, the heartrending separation has already begun, and by the time they pass me, I am
released and relaxed and can smile calmly at them; they have become friends, and we can
exchange the conspiratorial glance of those who have experienced many things together and
remember them all.
- Jeanloup Sieff.

Less is more.
- Mies van der Rohe.

I use photography not to try and produce an autonomous picture of reality....
but to listen to the inner reality which hides behind the visible.
- Robert Hausser

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
- Albert Einstein

I no longer work for anything but the sensation I have while working.
- Alberto Giacometti

Primitive people hid from the camera to avoid the theft of their souls. But they are mistaken.
It is, rather, the soul of the photographer that is captured by the photograph.
- Jeanloup Sieff.

The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.
- Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

A rich man is one who dispenses love and laughter to his fellow human beings.
- Unknown

If you want to change something in the world, change it in yourself.
- Barefoot Doctor

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
- Samuel Beckett, Murphy

There's only one way to defeat the sorrow and sadness of life - with laughter and rejoicing.
Bring out the good dishes, put on your good clothes, no sense hoarding them.
- Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again - then give up.
There's no use being a bloody fool about it!
- Spike Milligan

Sex without love is an empty experience. But as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.
- Woody Allen

In the flower stall two men sat like musicians,
weaving strands of marigold, garlands of jasmine and lily and rose,
their fingers picking, plucking, knotting, playing a floral melody.
- Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters

It is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational.
- Donna Tartt, The Secret History

God has no religion.
- Mahatma Gandhi

I want us all to face our fears and stop behaving like our goal in life is to merely survive.
"Surviving" is for wimps and game show contenstants stranded in the jungle or on a desert island.
You are not stranded. You own the store.
- Michael Moore, Stupid White Men

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure, nor this thing nor that, but simply growth.
We are happy when we are growing.
- William Butler Yeats

The content of communication is unimportant.
What counts is somebody on one end of a wire shouting "My God, I'm alive!"
and somebody on the other end shouting "My God, I'm alive too!"
- T.S. Matthews, editor of Time (Quoted by A.J. Liebling)

Literature and art are the best way into the psychology of mankind,
because of the ambiguity and the mystery.
- Camille Paglia

Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself
that we become rich.
- Sarah Bernhardt

All you need is love.
- The Beatles

Carpe Diem: There were people on the Titanic who waved away the desert trolley!

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