Stephen Spender
[Writer, poet, and critic, b. 1909, London, England, d. 1995, London.]
Dead friend, this picture proves there was an instantWhen—mirror of midday—you sent
Shadow and light from living flesh into
The sensitive dark instrument.
Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly
[Artist, b. 1928, Lexington, Virginia, d. 2011, Rome.]
The Image cannotbe dis possessed of a
priMORdial
freshness
which IDEAS
CAN NEVER CLAIM
Walt Whitman
[Writer and poet, b. 1819, South Huntington, Long Island, New York, d. 1892, Camden, New Jersey.]
You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,I believe that much unseen is also here.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
I’m not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It’s drowning yourself, dissolving yourself and then sniff, sniff, sniff—being sensitive to coincidence. You can’t go looking for it; you can’t want it, or you won’t get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens. Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice. Imogen Cunningham
[Photographer, b. 1883, Portland, d. 1976, San Francisco.]
The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet. Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock)
[Writer and artist, b. 1896, Moineti, Bacu, Romania, d. 1963, Paris.]
gloomy procession oh mechanics of the calendarwhere the synthetic photographs of days appear
the doll in the grave
Frank Horvat
[Photographer, b. 1928, Abbazia, Italy, now Opatija, Croatia, lives in Paris.]
To me, photography is not just a visual art, but something closer to poetry—or at least to some poetry, such as the haiku.