Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
[We] make images to see clearly: then we see clearly what we have made.
I prefer a taken to a made photograph.
Images proliferate. Am I wrong in being reminded of printing money in a period of wild inflation? Do we know what we are doing? Are we able to evaluate what we have done?
The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.
In the blur of the photograph, time leaves its gleaming, snail-like track.
The vast number of photographers, feeding on anything visible, overgraze the landscape the way cattle overgraze their pasture.
However much [photographs] may lie, they do so with the raw materials of truth.
What photographs usually do, more than anything else, is authenticate... existence. Authentication, not enlargement or interpretation is what we want.
