#Humanist

Due to popular demand Jeffrey Conley's exhibition, An Ode to Nature and Steve McCurry's The Endless Traveler have been extended until Saturday May 4th, 2024. Don't miss this opportunity to experience two amazing shows at our Santa Monica gallery. We look forward to your visit.

“At the moment of shooting (composition) can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment, and all the interrelationships involved are on the move……. It very rarely happens that a photograph which was feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the darkroom’s enlarger. The integrity of the vision is no longer there”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

"There’s a contemplative or meditative quality to photography, which I find to be a sort of peaceful state. When I’m walking around photographing, I get into a particular mindset where I become much more attuned to the world around me."

 

~ Steve McCurry

"I have often been asked what I think of that photo. What I think, to quote Proust, is that it is charged with something of the “transparent substance of our best moments,” those that we shared while we were young. Boubat and I, before the course of life made us drift apart, caught upon the spell that we were living under back then and what can only be called a poetic adventure.”

~ Lella, 1987
(Great muse of artist Edouard Boubat)

'Never give all the heart for love'

Never give all the heart for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss:
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright.
For they, for all smooth lips can say
Have given their heart up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost
For he gave all his heart and lost

~ W B Yates
(1865-1839)

“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

“I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty. I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth. I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives. I am a woman and I wanted to know about women”

 

~ Eve Arnold
(1912-2012)

“For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to give a meaning to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression"

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

“It is important that you respect what you are photographing."

 

~ Sebastião Salgado

“I have done a great deal of work to make all these photos and all these prints. I feel I have nothing to be ashamed of”

 

~ Wolfgang Suschitzky
(1912-2016)

“In general I don’t think too much. I certainly don’t use those funny words museum people and art critics like”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt
(1928 - 2023)

“Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn’t go too fast. The subject must forget about you.Then however, you must be very quick”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004)

"I do what I feel, that's all. I am an ordinary photographer working for his own pleasure. That's all I've ever done."

~ Andre Kertész
(1894-1985)

 

Perhaps more than any other photographer, Andre Kertész
discovered and demonstrated the special aesthetic of the small camera. These beautiful little machines seemed at first hardly serious enough for the typical professional, with his straightforward and factual approach to the subject. Most of those who did use small cameras tried to make them do what the big camera did better: deliberate, analytical description.

Kertész had never been much interested in deliberate analytical description; since he had begun photographing in 1912 he had sought the revelation of the elliptical view, the unexpected detail, the ephemeral moment - not the epic but the lyric truth. When the first 35 mm camera - the Leica - was marketed in 1925, to seemed to Kertész that it had been designed for his own eye.

Like his fellow Hungarian Moholy-Nagy, he loved the play between pattern and deep space; the picture plane of his photographs is like a visual trampoline, taut and resilient. In the picture opposite half of the lines converge toward a vanishing point in deep space; the other half knit the image together in a pattern as shallow as a spider web, in which the pedestrian dangles like a fly.

In addition to this splendid and original quality of formal invention, there is in the work of Kertész another quality less easily analyzed, but surely no less important. It is a sense of the sweetness of life, a free and childlike pleasure in the beauty of the world and the preciousness of sight."

~ John Szarkowski
(Looking At Photographs, 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski)

'In viewing the images in Devotion and at Peter Fetterman Gallery, I can only conclude that if, as the saying goes, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.,” then I’d revise that to say “Beauty is in the eye of Steve McCurry.'

 

~ Tom Teicholz

"I chose the camera as a tool to document different aspects of life: who we are, what we do, how we live, what our communities look like."

 

~ Earlie Hudnall (Jr.)

“Paris was that very special place where I defined myself as a photographer”

 

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

“In photography, the smallest thing can be great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotive”

 

~ Henri Cartier Bresson
(1908-2004)

“I didn’t want to be a "woman photographer”. That would limit me. I wanted to be a photographer who was a woman with all the world open to my camera”

 

~ Eve Arnold
1912-2012

“People always ask me “How do you relate to people. How do you get people to open up and relax?" I think it is just a question of experience. I think it’s a question of enjoying being with people.”

 

~ Steve McCurry

“When our paths crossed I found the man who taught me happiness”

 

~ Robert Doisneau

“I’ve had the privilege of being an outsider allowed on the inside searching for beauty, meaning and myself”

 

~ Bruce Davidson

“W. Eugene Smith’s photo essays taught me that a photograph could not only communicate emotion, but could also save the human condition”

 

~ Bruce Davidson

“There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.”

~ Michelle Obama

“There is a kind of pathos about the bride drinking at the bar. Humor is a feeling of shame for overt emotion. When the scene is too tender - or too cruel- you take refuge in humor to avoid that sense of embarrassment"

 

~ Robert Doisneau
1912-1994

“You cannot live when you are untouchable. Life is vulnerability”

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923 - 1999)

“For me photography is a passion, closer to an obsession. It is not an intellectual process. It is a visual one. While shooting, if we think too much we miss the birdie. A good photograph is a surprise. How could we plan a surprise? We just have to be ready.”

~ Marc Riboud
(1923-2016)

“I hate ugliness, it makes me physically ill. But melancholy and compassion, these may be minor values but they’re the ones that move me most of all.”

 

~Robert Doisneau

 

(1912-1994)

“The sun, which was already a little low created sharp silhouettes against the back light. I switched out the 28mm for the exact opposite, the 135 mm which would best form the image that I was hoping for and which I could already see in my head. Just as I hoped a little girl stepped on to the bridge. A single click”

~ Willy Ronis(1910-2009)

“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