George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot.
The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
The photographer is like the cod, which lays a million eggs in order that one may be hatched.
The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.
As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over.
(1901)
I’ve posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin’s Thinker, but I merely looked constipated.
If you cannot see at a glance that the old game is up, that the camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush as an instrument of artistic representation, then you will never make a true critic; you are only, like most critics, a picture-fancier.
(1901)
It is monstrous that custom should force us to display our faces ostentatiously, however worn and wrinkled and mean they may be, whilst carefully concealing all our other parts, however shapely and well preserved.
