James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]

 Many people, even some good photographers, talk of the “luck” of photography as if that were a disparagement. And it is true that luck is constantly at work. It is one of the cardinal creative forces in the universe, one which the photographer has unique equipment for collaborating with. And a photographer often shoots around a subject, especially one that is highly mobile and in continuous and swift development—which seems to me as much his natural business as it is for a poet who is really in the grip of his poem to alter and realter words in his line. It is true that most artists, though they know their own talent and its gifts as luck, work as well as they can against luck, and that in most good works of art, as in little else in creation, luck is either locked out or locked in and semidomesticated, or put to wholly constructive work; but it is peculiarly a part of the good photographer’s adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it. Most good photographs, especially the quick and lyrical kind, are battles between the artist and luck. 
 If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would all be photographs. (In the 1941 book with photographs by Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) 
 It is probably well on the conservative side to estimate that during the past ten to fifteen years the camera has destroyed a thousand pairs of eyes, corrupted ten thousand, and seriously deceived a hundred thousand, for every one pair that it has opened, and taught. 
 Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it? 
 The immediate instruments are two: the motionless camera and the printed word. 
 It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellect; it is, like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about. 
 The reason I love the camera is just this... It is... unlike any other leverage of art, incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth. 
 It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings... drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of photojournalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings... for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings in the name of science of ‘honest journalism’. 
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