Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
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 vast number of photographers, feeding on anything visible, overgraze the landscape the way cattle overgraze their pasture.
I prefer a taken to a made photograph.
However much [photographs] may lie, they do so with the raw materials of truth.
In the blur of the photograph, time leaves its gleaming, snail-like track.
[We] make images to see clearly: then we see clearly what we have made.
The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.
At this moment in photography’s brief history, the emergence and inflation of the photographer appears to be at the expense
of the photograph, of the miraculous.
(1978)
