#Portrait

“My dad used to have an expression. It’s the lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they are about to do and thinks it still matters”

~ President Joe Biden

“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda. It is a form of truth”

~ John F Kennedy

“This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men — to lift artificial weights from all shoulders — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all — to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

 

~ Abraham Lincoln

“For that second when I look through the lens I absolutely love the sitter and then I’m gone"~ Jane Bown(1925-2014)

“I have never wanted to give up performing on stage, but one day the tours will be over”

~ Mick Jagger

"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.)

“Street photography is a joy. But the most difficult thing for me is a portrait. It’s not at all like someone you catch on the street. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt, which is not an easy thing”

 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908 - 2004)

We are excited to share that the “The Power of Photography” exhibition is now on view at the Naples Art Institute in Naples, Florida. This exhibition will feature a selection of over 122 original prints curated by collector and gallerist Peter Fetterman, on view now until April 28th 2024. For more information on visiting the museum, please see below: 

The Power of Photography Exhibition
Naples Art Institue
585 Park Street
Naples, FL 34102

Naples Art Institue and Gallery Store
Monday/Wednesday/Friday/Saturday: 10 am - 6 pm
Tuesday/Thursday: 10 am - 8 pm
Sunday: 11 am - 4 pm

“…my way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things…”

~ Sebastiao Salgado

“January 19, 2am. It was two in the morning, just me and the Beatles in John’s room. They were in their night clothes, they‘d ordered up food and whiskey, and Brian Epstein came in. He had big news "I want to hold your hand" had just made it into the charts in US. They erupted in cackles. They were beaming. Then he put the icing on the cake. "And next month we’re off to America. You’re going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show". The song had just entered the Billboard 100 at number 45. (By February 1, it would be number one). So I saw my opening. I suggested they celebrate with a pillow fight-like the one George had mentioned to me before. John immediately shot it down. "No. It’ll make us look silly” But I kept my eye on John, who started slinking off. And just as I lifted my camera, John sneaked up behind Paul and pow, whacked him in the head with a pillow. Paul’s drink went flying and they were off”

 

~ Harry Benson

"Photography is a waiting game. The shutter may take only a instant, but the photographer has waited for exactly the right subject, the correct perspective, the perfect light, carefully arranging it all in the frame to be paused in time."

 

~ Douglas Gilbert

"I saw photographing jazz artists as a visual diary of what I was hearing. I wanted to preserve the mood and atmosphere as much as possible. My goal was to capture these artists at the height of their finest creative moments."

 

~ Herman Leonard
(1923-2010)

"All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us."

 

~ Alfred Stieglitz
(1918-2006)

“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom”

 

~ Bob Dylan

“Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York was like a prophecy come true. He fit the image that had already been established by Pete Seeger in his blue jeans and work shirts and by Woody Guthrie - a refugee from the dust bowl era -and his dirty rugged clothing. Dylan stepped into this legacy and played his character well with his own comedy and original insights. People remember that he was “stealing" from everybody around him, absorbing the entire scene. In the process he energized folk music, created his own songs, incorporated earlier American traditional music, shaped Rock’n’Roll and wrote some of the most moving songs of the century”

 

~ John Cohen
(1932 - 2019)

 

“At that time, whatever Dylan would send to the record companies, they would use. He picked all the inside photographs also. They were lying around my studio and he chose them."

 

~ Jerry Schatzberg

“The work is grounded. It’s solid and it hasn’t changed.. I have, but not the photographs.. I have great admiration for whoever I was, whoever the person was that did the work somehow in that time”

 

~ Sheila Metzner

"The awful truth is that I love all of cowboying, even when everything has gone wrong and it's not looking to get any better. Sometimes I especially like it that way."

~ Kurt Markus

“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity"

~ Henri Cartier Bresson

“It is still color, it is not yet light”

~Pierre Bonnard

“I like to have information rather than just have a brushstroke. Just to have these words to put in these feelings underneath.”

 

~ Jean-Michel Basquiat

We are pleased to announce that we have secured a group of the first editions copies of the amazing new Magnum Opus book Bob Dylan, Mixing up the Medicine (published by our friends Callaway), due to be released October 24th, 2023. I know this first edition is close to selling out already and will become a highly sought out and valuable collectible book in the years to come as this is the definitive bible on Bob Dylan.

 

If you would like to pre order some copies please contact Peter at peter@peterfetterman.com. The book is available at $100 (+packing/shipping).

 

Bob Dylan
Mixing Up The Medicine
Publisher: Callaway
608 pages
$100.00

 

 

Exhibition Opening : Tuesday, October 24th. 5-7 PM

Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica
2525 Michigan Ave, Suite A1

 

RSVP's Essential

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

 

~ Robert Doisneau

“Always keep your eyes open. Keep watching. Because whatever you see can inspire you.”

 

~ Grace Coddington

“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

“I like to have information rather than just have a brushstroke. Just to have these words to put in these feelings underneath.”

~ Jean-Michel Basquiat
(1960-1988)

“Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame…. I understand I’ve torn up the dreams of those around me. But those aren’t my dreams. No one ever asked me what my dreams were. They just got mad at me for not being who they wanted me to be”

~ Sinead O’Connor

"I photographed Sinead O’Connor for the first time in October 1988 for the NME (the leading British music paper). She was pretty shy, but she was only 21. Like many young musicians, she was quite intimidated by the fact that I’d photographed Ian Curtis (Joy Division). I then photographed her a year later for the same publication, two weeks after her 23rd birthday. She was more sure of herself and liked the ideas we worked with. Many of the shots were single spotlit head shots against a black cloth. This series used a similar light but against a grey cloth, echoing a 60s fashion style. This is my favourite shot from the session. Sinead looks fully in control of the look she’s giving me for the photograph."

~ Kevin Cummins

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy or any of your time or any of your space."

~ Johnny Cash

 

“A photographic session is a joint interpersonal exchange, a kind of creative encounter session at a high level of intensity. For me , photography is more a process of creating an experience than one of looking for pictures.”

~ Norman Seeff

“There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it”

~ Francis Crick

“Sir Francis was absolutely adorable. He had a twinkle in his eye and a tremendous sense of humor and humility abut him- this from the man who discovered the DNA double-helix.We had wonderful conversations about science and metaphysics.This shot, taken at the Salk Institute optimizes the style and sophistication of the man”

~ Norman Seeff

“I shot Whitney at the height of her career. Her voice was transcendent. She came into my studio so appreciative of what I was doing and very delicate in her interaction with me, more interested in my well being than anything else. I fell in love with her. She was sensitive and vulnerable and open”

~ Norman Seeff

“I decided long ago never to walk in anyone’s shadow. If I fail or if I succeed at least I did as I believed"

~ Whitney Houston

“Every night I was going somewhere. I’d work all day on a farm, play all night and get back home about sunrise. I’d get the mule and get right on going. I went to sleep once in the shed. I used to go to sleep so much when we were playing they called me “Sleepy”. But I never missed a note”

~ Sleepy John
(1899-1977)

“ I arrived at a small house far beyond the outskirts of Memphis. My guide asked Sleepy if I could photograph him. Sleepy replied “Okay buts got to buy beer” I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying-his southern accent was so extreme. My hippie guide had to act as an interpreter. I ended up buying a lot of beer. People from all around the neighborhood rolled up and it turned into a big party.”
~Norman Seeff

"All I really, really want our love to do
Is to bring out the best in me and in you too"

 

~ "All I Want" by Joni Mitchell

"If everybody had an ocean
Across the U.S.A
Then everybody'd be surfin'
Like Californi-a
You'd see them wearing their baggies
Huarache sandals too
A bushy bushy blond hairdo
Surfin' U.S.A"

~ "Surfin' U.S.A." by The Beach Boys

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life"

 

~ Steve Jobs
(1955-2011)

"Sex appeal is 50% what you've got and 50% what people think you've got.”

~ Sophia Loren

“I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me - like food or water.”

~ Ray Charles
(1930 - 2004)

“Soon after my arrival in NY, I met Robert and Patti at a downtown Manhattan bar. I thought they looked cool and asked them to do a session with me. The authenticity and emotional depth of their love was exactly what I was looking for in my images.”

~ Norman Seeff

"I didn't write it to be cathartic, I wrote it because Robert asked me to… Our relationship was such that I knew what he would want and the quality of what he deserved. So that was my agenda for writing that book. I wrote it to fulfil my vow to him, which was on his deathbed. In finishing, I did feel that I'd fulfilled my promise."

~ Patti Smith

Photo Basel Switzerland’s first and only international art fair dedicated to photography based art, now in its 8th edition, is open!

The fair takes place during Art Basel week from June 12^th – 18^th  at Volkshaus Basel, just a short walk from Art Basel at the convention centre.

 

 

"I make clothes. Women make fashion."

~ Azzedine Alaïa

“Influence comes from everywhere but when you are actually shooting you work primarily by instinct. But what is instinct? It is a lifetime of accumulation of influence, experience, knowledge, seeing and hearing. There is little time for reflection in taking a photograph. All your experience comes to a peak and you work on two levels, the conscious and the unconscious”

 

~ Arnold Newman
(1918-2006)

“I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead and anyone who does not remember. betrays them again"

 

~ Elie Wiesel
(1928-2016)

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as god himself”

 

~ Elie Wiesel(from his 1956 work “Night")

“Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture”

 

~ Arnold Newman

“I love New York even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it”

 

~ Truman Capote

"My best pictures are always taken when I succeed in establishing a bond of sympathy with my sitter"

~ Doris Ulmann
(1882 - 1934)

"Artists are the gate keepers of truth. We are civilization’s radical voice”

~ Paul Robeson
(1898 -1976)

“The pursuit of Justice is all I have ever known”

~ Harry Belafonte
(1927 - 2023)

“We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.”

~ Frank Lloyd Wright

“My work begins with recording an image, but it is not finished until I have made a fine print. That is my photograph. A lot goes into a finished documentary photograph, a very personal view of life, a knowledge of technique and of course information. It is the information that grabs the viewer but it is the photographers’s art that holds them."

~ George Zimbel

“I am a visually upbeat person. I see things that are “up” and it gets me interested"

~ George Zimbel

“I grew up not wanting to grow up. Growing up seemed terrible. To me it was awful. Children were free and sane and grown ups were hideous”

~ Mary Quant
(1930-2023)

“It is given to a fortunate few to be born at the right time, in the right place with the right talents. In recent fashion there are three. Chanel, Dior and Mary Quant”

~ Ernestine Carter

“At 16 I was a funny, skinny little thing, all eyelashes and legs. And then suddenly people told me I was gorgeous. I thought they had gone mad”

~ Twiggy

“At Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, I found Einstein, a simple, kindly almost childlike man, too great for any of the posturing of eminence. One did not have to understand his science to feel the power of his mind or the force of his personality. He spoke sadly, yet sincerely as one who had looked into the universe, far past mankind’s small affairs. When I asked him what the world would be like were another atomic bomb to be dropped, he replied wearily “Alas we will no longer be able to hear the music of Mozart”.

~ Yousuf Karsh

 

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning”

~ Albert Einstein

“There were about 100 people who ran the 1960’s in England and I was fortunate enough to meet, work with and/or photograph virtually all of them”

~ Robert Whitaker

“Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow”

~ John Lennon

"It’s difficult to get there, but once you manage to find your own voice it gets somewhat easier, because you know what you want to see in your images."

 

~ Noell Oszvald

“The world makes up my pictures not me"

~ Lee Friedlander

“In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach towards more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy - a trust, an affection - for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world in spite of it’s terrors as the source of all wonder and fascination and value-no less precious for being irrational ."

~ John Szarkowski

“Richard Diebenkorn’s fame as a painter continues to grow. Here he’s in his Oakland studio, but I first knew him in Sausalito, where a group of artists would sit around with a jug of Gallo’s Heavy Burgundy and moan about how badly they were treated. Diebenkorn, always the lanky kid in the corner of that group, never joined in on the complaining. A burning cigarette was his constant companion in almost every shot I ever made of him”

~ Fred Lyon

“I don’t go into the studio with the idea of “saying” something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue”

~ Richard Diebenkorn

I think this is one of the most expressive jazz images I've ever made. Of course, I didn't make it, I just captured it.

 

~ Fred Lyon
(1924-2022)

“I decided to photograph her as another friend had described her
“Georgia, her pure profile calm, clearer sleek black hair drawn swiftly back into a tight knot at the nape of her necktie strong white hands, touching and lifting everything, even the boiled eggs, as if they were living things-sensitive slow moving hands, coming out of the black and white, always this black and white".

 

~ Yousuf Karsh
(1908-2002)

“It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve. To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.”

 

~ Georgia O’Keefe
(1887-1986)

"One day in a second-hand shop near Covent Garden, I found a 70 year old wooden Kodak. I was delighted. Like nineteenth-century cameras it had no shutter, and the wide-angle lens, with an aperture as minute as a pin-hole, was focused on infinity. In 1926, Edward Weston wrote in his diary “The camera sees more than the eyes, so why not make use of it”. My new camera saw more and saw it differently. It created a great illusion of space, an unrealistically steep perspective and it distorted. When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed."

~ Bill Brandt
(1904-1983)

“The maestro’s villa was a photographer’s nightmare, with his boisterous children bicycling through vast rooms already crowded with canvases. I eagerly accepted Picasso’s alternate suggestion to meet later in Vallauris at his ceramics gallery. “He will never be here” the gallery owner commented, when my assistant and two hundred pounds of equipment arrived. “He says the same thing to every photographer”. To everyone’s amazement the “old lion” not only kept his appointment with me but was prompt and wore a new shirt. He could partially view himself in my large format lens and intuitively moved to complete the composition”

 

~ Yousuf Karsh
(1908-2002)

“For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography”

~ Pablo Picasso
(1881-1973)

“Today people talk a lot about “reading” a photograph. That means getting it, understanding what it’s all about. But man, when it comes to Herman Leonard, I think a better word is “listen”. You need to “listen” to Herman's pictures. They are full of music and you can hear it”

~ Quincy Jones
(Quoted in the book “Listen: Herman Leonard and his World of Jazz”- 21st Editions)

“For some people the word “elegance” has acquired objectionable, snobbish connotations. But I myself prefer to regard elegance as an attractive and admirable - if admittedly rare - human attribute: a form of physical and mental grace that has nothing to do with pretension or over refinement or an excess of money to spend. Unlike Huene, who had absorbed an infallible sense of elegance from his upbringing, I had to invent it on my own: more exactly, to learn gradually to recognize elegance in others and try to portray it in my photographs.”

~ Horst P Horst

“Today music is visual”

~ Archie Shepp

"When you're observant, inspiration can show up in the most unusual places, triggering a new idea to appear.”

~ Noell Oszvald

“I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you,
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you, bend to you,
and the measure of my changing love for you,
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume my heart with its cruel ray,
stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who dies,
The only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.”

~ Pablo Neruda
(Sonnet LXVI: I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You)

“Pictures have to do with heart and mind and eye and they have to communicate and as long as they do that it’s valid”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

“Dogs have more to do than children. For one thing, they are focused to lead a life that is really schizoid. Every minute, they have to be on two planes at once, juggling the dog world against the human world. And they’re always on call. Their owners want instant affection everyday, any time of day. A dog can never say that he has other things to do. He can never have a headache, like a wife.”

 

~ Elliott Erwitt

"The world is as good as you are. You've got to learn to like yourself first."

~ Steve McQueen
(1930-1980)

“Although she seems uncertain, her understanding of what would make her a movies star was so great. The need also was so great. The intelligence was there too. She created Marilyn. She created that character, it wasn’t the movies that did it. She did it. She had much more control with a still camera than in the movies. We would discuss what we were going to do and then we would play. We used to laugh a lot. It was great.
Neither one of us knew what we were doing and that was a bond between us. Secondly, I was not a threat to her. I had six sessions with her. The shortest was two hours which was a press event, and the longest was two months on the set of “The Misfits”. Her enemy was that she couldn’t sleep, so she would take sleeping tablets. I saw an enormous change in her over the ten years that I photographed her. In that time she had gone from a beginner to a world figure and it had taken its toll. She created “Marilyn Monroe” but it was very hard on her. To my knowledge as long as she could fantasize about being a movie star she was fine. It was when the fantasy became the reality that it was hard”

 

~ Eve Arnold
(1912 - 2012)

“A nice girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none”

~ Marilyn Monroe
(1926 - 1962)

 

"Jacques is the most meticulous person I know. He spent 2 hours taking the old bicycle to pieces. He has the same patience with every kind of mechanism. A gag is just another piece of clockwork”

 

~ Robert Doisneau
(1912-1994)

“The images are designed so that after you see the picture 2 or 3 times, it’s no longer my film. It starts to be your film. You recognize the people, you know them and you don’t even know who directed the picture. “Play Time” is nobody.

 

~ Jacques Tati
(1907-1982)

“On April 4, 1968 amidst rising racial tension, Martin Luther King Jr, was shot while the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis,Tennessee. America was shocked, stunned and again pitched into the nightmare of violent death and public agony, not five years after President John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. I was nearby and flew to Memphis and then on to Atlanta to cover the funeral. Arriving in advance of the plane that was carrying the body of the slain civil rights leader, I moved out of the photographers’ allotted area on the tarmac for a moment and caught one frame of his widow, Coretta Scott King and their children as they prepared to step down from the plane. Crowds lined up outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to quietly view the casket and pay tribute to the slain leader.”

~ Harry Benson

“Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation”

~ Coretta Scott King
(1927 - 2006)

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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

"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”.