Charles Baudelaire
[Writer, b. 1821, Paris, d. 1867, Paris.]

 All children talk to their toys; the toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced in size by the camera obscura of their little brains. 
 A good picture, which is the faithful equivalent of the dream which has begotten it, should be brought into being like a world. 
 ... the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too last to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but also had the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; bit I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. (1859) 
 Photography must, therefore, return to its true identity, which is that of handmaid of the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid, like printing and shorthand, which have neither created nor supplanted literature... Let it be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons... But if once it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us! 
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