“Through absence of color, three-dimensionality and motion, the black-and-white photography is ipso facto ‘unnatural’. It expresses reality symbolically: gray tone values instead of color, two-dimensional projection (perspective) instead of space, blurredness or single-phase instead of constant motion. It is ‘symbolic’ in the same sense that speech and writing are, where sounds (words) are symbols for objects and conceptions, and signs (letters) are symbols for sounds (words). Photography means ‘reproduction’ only in the rare cases where the rendering of a two-dimensional, black-and-white object is the aim; otherwise it must be called a translation.”
Andreas Feininger, Feininger on Photography (1949, pp.195-196)
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Schwalberg on Henri Cartier-Bresson
“He practices his own special brand of outside-looking-in photography. He roams he world with a Leica. About 90 percent of his pictures are made with 50-mm normal-focus lenses. He never poses. He never arranges. If observed, he instantly breaks off action. He adds no photographic lighting, but uses light exactly as he finds it. He eschews every specialized optical effect, from limited depth of field to ultra-wide-angle vision. In effect, he is the theoretically ideal photographer who sees without being seen, records without impinging upon his subjects.”
Bob Schwalberg, “Cartier-Bresson Today”, Popular Photography, 60(5), P.108 (1967)
Galileo’s homemade telescope
“This I did shortly afterwards, my basis being the theory of refraction. First I prepared a tube of lead , at the ends of which I fitted two glass lenses, both plane on one side while on the other side one was spherically convex. Then placing my eye near the concave lens I perceived objects satisfactorily large and near, for they appeared three times closer and nine times larger than when seen with the naked eye alone .”
− Galileo Galilei published the initial results of his telescopic observations of the heavens in Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius) in 1610
Moriyama on the power of photographs
“Of course, in the instant you press the shutter button, a memory of the image flashes across your mind, together with the various things you’re thinking about in that moment – aesthetic considerations, concepts, desires. But whatever’s in the photograph stands completely independent of those thoughts. That is what remains – and it’s completely independent. That is what calls to you years, maybe decades later. “Hey! What do you think?” That’s what’s so amazing. that’s why photography is so powerful.”
Daido Moriyama How I Take Photographs, Takeshi Nakamoto (2019)
B&W versus colour
“In black-and-white the photographer has to translate in his mind’s eye the colours of his subject into a range of tones before he presses the trigger, and that effort alone makes black-and-white in a way more creative than colour. It paraphrases and formalizes more. Structure, texture, and rich tonal quality are all weakened by colour, for colour tends to distract the eye from strong forms and their pure architecture. A decorative prettiness may be gained by colour, and sometimes emotional force too, but drama is often lost, not least the drama of a significant instant of action which will never recur. Light in its various moods has deep emotional meanings for everyone, and black-and-white can often convey those meanings more powerfully than colour.”
Eric de Maré, Color Photography (1973)
Eric de Maré on seeing
“What is reality? The very act of seeing is to a large degree creative, for we never perceive reality as such, nor can we ever do so. Seeing is the result of training from birth and of the effects of the cultural inheritance of that training. The mind created images from the rough, raw material of the light waves picked up by the optic nerves and transmitted upside-down to the brain, where it is transmuted, the right way up, into significant forms which help us to survive.
Eric de Maré, Colour Photography
From the very limitations of all our senses we are able to create a human world from the chaos of that so-called reality which we do not, and may never be able, fully to comprehend. Seeing is too often taken for granted, but it is by no means the simple, obvious activity it is generally taken to be. It is, indeed, the most extraordinary and inexplicable mystery.”
Dürrenmatt on observation
“Anyone can take a snap – even a photomat, but not everyone has the powers of observation. Photography is only an art when it makes use of the art of observation. Observation is an elementary poetic process.”
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Swiss playwright
Feininger on B&W versus colour
“Black-and-white photography is essentially an abstract medium, while color photography is primarily realistic. Furthermore, in black-and-white a photographer is limited to two dimensions – perspective and contrast – whereas in color a photographer works with three: perspective, contrast, and color. In order to be able to exploit the abstract qualities of his medium, a photographer who works in black-and-white deliberately trains himself to disregard color; instead, he evaluates color in terms of black-and-white, shades of gray, and contrast of light and dark. A color photographer’s approach is the exact reverse: not only is he very much aware of color as ‘color’, but he decidedly tries to develop a ‘color eye’ – a sensitivity to the slightest shifts in hue, saturation, and brightness of color.”
Andreas Feininger, “Successful Color Photography (1966)
Steinbeck on Robert Capa
“Capa’s pictures were made in his brain – the camera only completed them. You can no more mistake his work than you can the canvas of a fine painter. Capa knew what to look for and what to do with it when he found it. He knew, for example, that you cannot photograph war because it is largely an emotion. But he did photograph that emotion by shooting beside it. He could show the horror of a whole people in the face of a child. His camera caught and held emotion.”
John Steinbeck, “Robert Capa” in The Best of Popular Photography (1979)
Szarkowski on the history of photography
“The history of photography has been less a journey than a growth. Its movement has not been linear and consecutive, but centrifugal. Photography, and our understanding of it, has spread from a center; it has, by infusion, penetrated our consciousness. Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in out progressive discovery of it that its history lies.”
John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (1966)
Crafting Pixels 