Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
The vast number of photographers, feeding on anything visible, overgraze the landscape the way cattle overgraze their pasture.
The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.
[We] make images to see clearly: then we see clearly what we have made.
In the blur of the photograph, time leaves its gleaming, snail-like track.
However much [photographs] may lie, they do so with the raw materials of truth.
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?
In the photographer’s aspiration to be an “artist” does he enlarge his own image at the expense of the photograph?
