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.
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.
As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over.
(1901)
I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot.
I’ve posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin’s Thinker, but I merely looked constipated.
The photographer is like the cod, which lays a million eggs in order that one may be hatched.
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)
... nobody can take three steps into a modern photographic exhibition without asking himself, amazedly, how he could ever allow himself to be duped into admiring, and even cultivating an insane connoisseurship in the old barbarous smudging and soaking, the knifing and graving, rocking and scratching, faking and forging, all on a basis of false and coarse drawing, the artist either outfacing his difficulties by making a merit of them, or else falling back on convention and symbolism to express himself when his lame power of representation break down.
(1901)
