DAILY BLOG

“Everything inside the frame is equally important”

~ Pentti Sammallahti

“I am a lucky man. I can do something with almost anything I see. Everything is still interesting to me"

~ André Kertész

“Crowds of skiers were waiting to catch a glimpse of the elegant former First Lady who was on holiday with her children. You could tell it was her from a mile away, even in a ski mask with the signature sunglasses propped on her head. You could still see her eyes - those eyes like no others”

~ Harry Benson
(b. 1929)

“For all of us, the Earth sustains our existence. In an otherwise in hospitable known universe, our little blue planet provides us with absolutely everything. I’ve never understood why our societal and spiritual priorities as a species do not overwhelmingly demonstrate our gratitude by placing our planet at the pinnacle of the reverential order”

 

~ Jeffrey Conley

“It was 3.00am after a concert at the Olympia in Paris in January 1964. They had so much pent-up energy after a performance, and they really couldn’t go out because they would be mobbed. So we were sitting around talking and drinking. Their manager, Brian Epstein burst into their suite at the George V Hotel to tell them, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was number one on the American charts, which meant they were going to America to be on The Ed Sullivan Show. That also meant I was going to America with them and I was pleased. America had always fascinated me. Ever since I was a boy in Glasgow watching James Cagney gang movies, I knew that was where I wanted to be.

They were excited about having a number -one hit in America. I had heard the Beatles talking about a pillow fight they had had a few nights before, so I suggested it. I thought it would make a good photo to celebrate. At first they said okay, but then John said, no, it would make them look silly, so that was that. Then John slipped up behind Paul and hit him over the head with a pillow, spilling his drink, and that started it."

~ Harry Benson

“A plane aims for the heavens but goes no higher while heaven continues upward, boundless like dreams, infinite like the horizon across the windows. A man with his head in the clouds dreams, free”

 

~ John Simmons

“I always had a strange feeling about how we order time into the past, present and future, as I never really felt that way."

 

~ Miho Kajioka

“On the day of this picture, I think we’d just had lunch and strolled down to the beach to have a swim. It was September but it was still vey warm. I was just snapping away and said, “I love this beautiful house, just please sit down here.” So Marianne sat down and I did a few pictures with my Pentax 67 which is actually pretty big for carrying on the beach, but I just have to have a camera with me all the time. It was a bit like a fashion shoot because I was directing her rather than just letting her do her thing.I think I even said, “Please put your hand up to your head and close your eyes. Head up a bit and just go into a dream world”. The scene was very posh and I wanted to get that across. I always say my wife belongs to the 1950’s”.

 

~ John Swannell

“It is absolutely clear we need to recognize the universality of human rights, the indivisibility of human rights and we need to find a new energy that motivates young people around the world.”

~ Volker Tucker (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights)

 

“It is in your hands to make a better world for all who live in it”

~ Nelson Mandela

“Across the narrow Rue Lepic from the Moulin de La Galette, up eight flights of stairs under the thin roof of a Montmartre studio garret lived an old widow. She was the wife of Leon Fauche, an impressionist painter who was a close friend of Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. Her husband died leaving her with a small military pension and 60 paintings. Montmartre changed but the widow stayed on. Each day she would go down to the streets crowded with tourists seeking the past and buy flowers to place under her husband’s self portrait. Then at twilight, as the weakening evening rays made a shadowy symbol of a long dead Paris through her studio window of the Moulin de la Galette, she was absorbed into darkness with her memories”

 

~ Esquire Magazine, October 1958

 

“All my photographs are portraits, self portraits because you can’t photograph someone without reflecting/echoing, like a bat sending out a signal that comes back to you. You get not only a picture of who you are photographing but you get a picture of yourself at the same time”

 

~ Bruce Davidson

“For as long as I can remember I have felt most at peace outdoors. Nature has always been my refuge and sanctuary. I find the natural world to be endlessly wondrous in it’s range of character and texture, from moments of delicate intimacy and subtlety to the massively expansive and powerful”

 

~Jeffrey Conley

“Everybody can look but they don’t necessarily see”

 

~ André Kertész (1894-1985)

“Only the photographer, himself or herself, knows the effects he or she wants. They should know by instinct, grounded in experience what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft light or by dark treatment”

~ Bill Brandt (1904 - 1983)

 

“I believe in deeply ordered chaos”

~ Francis Bacon, Painter (1909-1992)

“I realized that pictures are far more important than the photographers themselves. For myself I could only say the whole of the game was to remain invisible and to have the least possible impact on what was going on around me”

~ Dominique Tarlé

“To me “Exile on Main Street" was probably the best Rolling Stones album as far as the connection between the band members. We were coming up with song ideas like crazy and the ideas were catching on. Everyone was going flat out”

~Keith Richards

“I had set up near a bakery at peak hour and after a few attempts, I was not sure I had the right image. Then I noticed a boy seriously counting his pennies while waiting for his turn and I explained to him what I needed from him. Exit the bakery in a hurry with the loaf held tilted under his left arm. The first attempt was too tense, the second was perfect. We went back into the bakery to eat a chocolate treat together"

~ Willy Ronis

“250 grams of magic and perfection in our daily lives. A French way of life. We had been fighting for years with bakers and the world of gastronomy for its recognition. The baguette is now a Unesco intangible heritage.”

~ Emmanuel Macron (President of France)

“My way of life, my very being is based on images capable of engraving themselves indelibly in our inner soul’s eye.”

~ Louis Stettner (1922 -2016)

"I see my pictures like pages of a coloring book in which content is stripped to the bare essence."

~ Noell Oszvald

“Light, gesture, gaze, movement, silence, tension, rest, rigor, relaxation. I would like to incorporate everything in this instant, to express the essence of humanity with the minimum of means”

 

~ Sabine Weiss

“Form an extended sequence that moves from innocence to decay and return.”

 

~ Jed Devine

“The world has been always made of many different layers – even before the disaster. And there have been always problems, and beautiful things have always remained beautiful…”

~ Miho Kajioka

“I just get the will to do it. I don’t plan a photograph in advance… I work by impulse. No philosophy. No ideas. Not by the head but by the eyes. Eventually inspiration comes - instinct is the same as inspiration, and eventually it comes.”

 

~ Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexico, b. 1902-2002)

“I remember how I loved to walk through the fair as a little kid and look at all these rare birds that I knew I would never see alive. Years and years had passed since I thought about those birds, and I really wanted to photograph them.”

~ Laszlo Layton

"For me photographs are taken in the eye before you've even thought what they mean. That's the reality I'm interested in capturing"

~ Daido Moriyama

"He is a magician with the camera, the camera being his magic eye."

~David Blochwitz

"It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about."

 

~ John Szarkowski
(1925-2007)

“People don’t understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it”

~ Billie Holiday

“I was merely a living witness. What does any good journalist do? Record what’s going on, observe the artist and their expressions, then leap in. You’ve got to react to something that’s happening or anticipate that it’s about to happen.”

 

~ Don Hunstein

“My work is inspired by my life. I express myself through my photographs. Everything that surrounds me provokes my feelings"

 

~ André Kertész (1895-1985)

"The models are friends of mine: these photographs involve moments of complicity that only a friend could accept. If there is no fondness between the model and the photographer, this kind of work cannot be done."

 

~ Flor Garduño

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in it’s entirety. And the expression of what one feels should be set forth in terms of simple devotion to the medium - a statement of the utmost clarity and perfection possible under the conditions of creation and production”

~Ansel Adams
(1902-1984)

 

“Ansel Adams was one of the great photographers of this century. He was also one of the best loved spokespersons for the obligations we owe to the natural world. It has been easy to confuse the related but distinct achievements that earned him these twin honors. Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save. His great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world”

John Szarkowski
(1925 - 2007)

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm” ~Winston Churchill
(1874-1965)

“Churchill was arguably the most important man of the 20th Century and one of the reasons I wanted to become a photojournalist. This was Sir Winston’s last visit to his old school, Harrow. For the occasion students added a chorus to the school’s song...“And Churchill’s name shall win acclaim through each new generation."... It brought tears to his eyes. It was his last visit to the school.”

~Harry Benson

“The camera is an unsophisticated mechanical instrument which, like a mirror, reflects passively without a conscience. The artist must supply the conscience.”

~ Ralph Eugene Meatyard
(1925-1972)

“I think that a photograph to be strong has to recount some aspect of the human condition, enable us to feel the emotion that the photographer felt before her subject”

 

~ Sabine Weiss

"Everyone is free to figure out what the picture says to them. It’s very interesting to read so many different thoughts about the same piece of work.”

 

- Noell Osvald

“A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with their freedom”

~Bob Dylan (b. 1941)

Bruce is one of the great Magnum photographers best known for his gritty urban work. This is a rare gem in his archive. Full of wonderment, humanity and hope.

"I need to become completely anonymous if I’m to capture the essence, the root fact about the person and not merely their surface."

~Dan Budnik

Ansel Adams is justly celebrated for his epic depictions of majestic landscapes, but this rare, little discussed, haunting image of displaced children shows his profound empathy for humanity. Certainly on a par with his close colleague Dorothea Lange’s, “Migrant Mother”, certainly no less powerful.

Taking up photography at the age of 40 years old, urged on by her children as an antidote to her husband leaving to run the family plantations in India, Julia Margaret Cameron became the first great female photographer. It is so hard to find her prints in such perfect condition as this one. I had collected several in the past in not so great a condition but it was always a dream to find a 10. My dream came true with this one and it just transports me to a special pace each time I look at it.

I was visiting our great friend and artist, Pentti Sammallahti, in Helsinki and I casually said to him, “Perhaps there is another great photographer in Finland I should meet?”

This is my favorite Arnold Newman image. Such a great environmental portrait with a true sense of destiny as JFK looks to the future. Where is our leader now?

Wynn Bullock, to my mind, is one the greatest 20th Century photographers. Often eclipsed by his more well known contemporaries, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.  This is a haunting portrait of his mother’s hands taken in his modest house in Carmel in 1956. The beauty of the print just knocks me out and is the definition of the word “primal”.

Of course, “The Steerage” is one of the most celebrated images in the history of photography. For good reason as its' genius graphic construction and human empathy is utterly timeless.

Jerusalem has been, and is, the spiritual home to three major religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. To say it is a magical place is a great understatement.

I have seen and collected many images of The Holy Land but this recent acquisition is I think the greatest I have ever seen taken at this special place. I believe it to be a unique print. It is as if Irving Penn had been transported back in time.