George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
I’ve posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin’s Thinker, but I merely looked constipated.
As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over.
(1901)
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.
I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot.
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.
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)
... the eyes of artist had been so long educated to accept the most grossly fictitious conventions as truths of representation that many of the truths of the focusing-screen were at first repudiated as grotesque falsehoods.
(1901)
