George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.
I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot.
As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over.
(1901)
The photographer is like the cod, which lays a million eggs in order that one may be hatched.
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’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)
There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing ridiculous... take the case of the ordinary academician. He gets hold of a pretty model, he puts a dress on her and he paints her as well as he can and calls her “Juliet,” and puts a nice verse from Shakespeare underneath, and puts the picture in the Gallery. It is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl; he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her “Juliet,” but somehow it is no good—it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet.
