When I look up

“When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Mankind

“Mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.”
― Joseph Heller

Keep my Dreams

“I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.”
― Joseph Heller

Miraculous

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch 22

Catch-22

“They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.
No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.
Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.
They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."
And what difference does that make?”
― Joseph Heller, Catch 22

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Explanations or Why I avoided Grad School

If the poem can be improved by the author’s explanations, it never should have been published.
ARCHIBALD MacLEISH

Tap into what you don't want to say

Tap into what you don't want to say. Tap into that secret place, despite the agony, despite the personal pain, over and above the fatigue.
ARTHUR PENN

Don't Dumb things Down

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see

“Trust that little voice in your head that says ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if…’; And then do it.” – Duane Michals

“Don’t try to be an artist. Find the thing within you that needs to be expressed. You might find it is art.” – Duane Michals

“I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I’m not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.” – Duane Michals

“People believe in the reality of photographs, but not in the reality of paintings. That gives photographers an enormous advantage. Unfortunately, photographers also believe in the reality of photographs.” – Duane Michals

“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.” – Duane Michals

“I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I’m not interested in what things look like.” – Duane Michals

“You can never capture a person in picture, never. You might get an interesting expression or gesture. I almost never research a picture subject ahead of time. I think Karsh is full of baloney. Can you imagine spending a whole week out in La Jolla with Jonas Salk soaking up his ambiance, then wind up making him look as if he’s in the studio in Ottawa with his thumb under his chin?” – Duane Michals

“Because of my involvement with my photographs, it is difficult for me really to see them objectively. Talking about them is like talking about myself. The only real idea that I have about them is that they are essentially snapshots. For snapshots, I feel, often have an inherent simplicity and directness that I find beautiful. The roots of my photographs are in this tradition.” – Duane Michals

“However, I think that the photographer must completely control his picture and bring to it all his personality, and in this area most photographs never transcend being just snapshots. When a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful.” – Duane Michals

“The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at . . .. We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong . . .. That’s why I consider most photographs extremely boring–just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colors have been added to protect the innocent. It’s just boring. But that whole arena of one’s experience–grief, loneliness–how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see. It’s all sitting up here. I could do all my work sitting in my room. I don’t have to go anywhere.” – Duane Michals

“I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn’t tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.” – Duane Michals

“Photography does deal with ‘truth’ or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality – it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?” – Duane Michals

“I believe in the invisible. I do not believe in the definitive reality of things around us. For me, reality is the intuition and the imagination and the quiet voice inside my head that says: isn’t that extraordinary? The things in our lives are the shadows of reality, just as we ourselves are shadows.” – Duane Michals

“Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?” – Duane Michals

“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.” – Duane Michals

“Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.” – Duane Michals

“I use photography to help me explain my experiences to myself.” – Duane Michals

“I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.” – Duane Michals

“I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.” – Duane Michals

“All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.” – Duane Michals

“Art is really whispering, not shouting.” – Duane Michals

“My gift to you is that I am different.” – Duane Michals

Charles Sheeler

“I have come to value photography more and more for those things which it alone can accomplish rather than to discredit it for the things which it alone can accomplish rather than to discredit it for the thing which can only be achieved through another medium.” – Charles Sheeler

“Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.” – Charles Sheeler

“My interest in photography, paralleling that in painting, has been based on admiration for its possibility of accounting for the visual world with an exactitude not equaled by any other medium. The difference in the manner of arrival at their destination—the painting being a result of composite image and the photograph being a result of a single image—prevents these media from being competitive.” – Charles Sheeler

“I favor a picture which arrives at its destination without the evidence of a trying journey rather than one which shows the marks of battle.” – Charles Sheeler

“I just don’t want to see any more than is absolutely necessary of the materials, physical material that goes into a picture.” – Charles Steeler

“Every age manifests itself by some external evidence. In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers-it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.” – Charles Sheeler

“You don’t build the house first and then make a blueprint after wards.” – Charles Steeler

“When we look at the next thing in sequence to the first object that we have gazed at, there’s still an overtone carried over of what the retina has just previously recorded.” – Charles Steeler

“There’s a large element of symbolism in O’Keeffe’s work, as you can readily see, and none whatever in mine. It’s purely a visual thing, and what you see is what you intend to see and no overtones of symbolism.” – Charles Steeler

“Photography is only visual, thank God! The lens is an unpsychological piece of glass whether formulated by Zeiss or Bausch and Lomb or whomever.” – Charles Sheeler

“When one goes back to our early photography whose mechanics was extremely simple and from our modern point of view often crude, it’s easy to see that the present immense elaboration of means isn’t very important.” – Charles Sheeler

“I feel that when photography became in general use I felt that it eliminated the points of those paintings which were immediately preceding photography. I don’t know of anything they added. In fact, I think photography in the same vein added a lot more than those paintings.” – Charles Steeler

“Isn’t it amazing how photography has advanced without improving.” – Charles Sheeler

Start Stealing

“Once a woman who does street work said to me, ‘I’ve never photographed anyone I haven’t asked first.’ I said to her, ‘Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again – it never would have been the same. Start stealing!’
– Imogen Cunningham

The Formula

“The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.
Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham

“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” – Imogen Cunningham

“I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.” – Imogen Cunningham

“I was poor. When you’re poor you work, and when you’re rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.” – Imogen Cunningham

“I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn’t have a darkroom, but that didn’t stop me from photographing.” – Imogen Cunningham

“I photograph anything that can be exposed to light. The reason during the twenties that I photographed plants was that I had three children under the age of four to take care of so I was cooped up. I had a garden available and I photographed them indoors. Later when I was free I did other things.” – Imogen Cunningham

“I wasn’t very ambitious. I think that’s the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn’t say I didn’t have any problem, but I didn’t care. I didn’t think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.” – Imogen Cunningham

“One must be able to gain an understanding at short notice and close range of the beauties of character, intellect, and spirit so as to be able to draw out the best qualities and make them show in the outer aspect of the sitter. To do this one must not have a too pronounced notion of what constitutes beauty in the external and, above all, must not worship it. To worship beauty for its own sake is narrow, and one surely cannot derive from it that esthetic pleasure which comes from finding beauty in the commonest things.” – Imogen Cunningham

“A woman said to me when she first sat down, You’re photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?” – Imogen Cunningham

“So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer. – Imogen Cunningham

“The thing that’s fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.” – Imogen Cunningham

“I’m never satisfied staying in one spot very long, I couldn’t stay with the mountains and I couldn’t stay with the trees and I couldn’t stay with the rivers. But I can always stay with people, because they really are different. ” – Imogen Cunningham

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.” – Imogen Cunningham

“There are too many people studying it (photography) now who are never going to make it. You can’t give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don’t learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.” – Imogen Cunningham

“The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.
Imogen Cunningham

“You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]’s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots – that can be very tedious. And so it’s only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.” – Imogen Cunningham

“Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There’s always someone who doesn’t like it.” – Imogen Cunningham

“Once a woman who does street work said to me, ‘I’ve never photographed anyone I haven’t asked first.’ I said to her, ‘Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again – it never would have been the same. Start stealing!’ – Imogen Cunningham

“I don’t talk about success. I don’t know what it is. Wait until I’m dead.” – Imogen Cunningham

Dorthea Lange

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange

“Put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.” – Dorothea Lange

“I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.” – Dorothea Lange

“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.” – Dorothea Lange

“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.” – Dorothea Lange

“To be good, photographs have to be full of the world.” – Dorothea Lange

“Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.” – Dorothea Lange

“You know, so often it’s just sticking around and being there, remaining there, not swooping out in a cloud of dust: sitting down on the ground with people, letting children look at your camera with their dirty, grimy little hands, and putting their fingers on the lens, and you just let them, because you know that if you will behave in a generous manner, you are apt to receive it, you know?” – Dorothea Lange

“This benefit of seeing…can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image…the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.” – Dorothea Lange

“It is not a factual photograph per se. The documentary photograph carries with it another thing, a quality in the subject that the artist responds to. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode or the circumstance or the situation that can only be revealed – because you can’t really recapture it – by this other quality. There is no real warfare between the artist and the documentary photographer. He has to be both.” – Dorothea Lange

“Art is a by-product of an act of total attention.” – Dorothea Lange

“I would like to see photographers become responsible and photography realize its potential.” – Dorothea Lange

“My own approach is based upon three considerations. First – hands off ! Whenever I photograph I do not molest or tamper with or arrange. Second – a sense of place. I try to picture as part of its surroundings, as having roots. Third – a sense of time. Whatever I photograph, I try to show as having its position in the past or in the present.” – Dorothea Lange

“The contemplation of things as they are, without error of confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.” – Dorothea Lange

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange

“Every image he sees, every photograph he takes, becomes in a sense a self-portrait. The portrait is made more meaningful by intimacy – an intimacy shared not only by the photographer with his subject but by the audience.” – Dorothea Lange

“Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion…the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.” – Dorothea Lange

“As photographers, we turn our attention to the familiarities of which we are a part. So turning, we in our work can speak more than of our subject – we can speak with them; we can more than speak about our subjects – we can speak for them. They, given tongue, will be able to speak with and for us. And in this language will be proposed to the lens that with which, in the end, photography must be concerned – time, and place, and the works of man.” – Dorothea Lange

“I’ve never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning – but some phase of photographer I’ve always been.” – Dorothea Lange

“It came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and concentrate on people, only people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn’t.” – Dorothea Lange

“I am trying here to say something about the despised, the defeated, the alienated. About death and disaster, about the wounded, the crippled, the helpless, the rootless, the dislocated. About finality. About the last ditch.” – Dorothea Lange

“The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.” – Dorothea Lange

Andre Kertesz

“I am an amateur and I intend to stay that way for the rest of my life.” – Andre Kertesz

“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 Kertesz

“Photography is my only language.” – Andre Kertesz

“The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything around me.” – Andre Kertesz

“Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison d’être. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison d’être, which lives on in itself.” – Andre Kertesz

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

“I can’t talk about my style. It us kind of difficult for me. I don’t like styles. I only like taking photos and expressing myself through them.” – Andre Kertesz

“If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hava a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn’t the alphabed that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression.” – Andre Kertesz

“Technique isn’t important. Technique is in the blood. Events and mood are more important than good light and the happening is what is important.”- Andre Kertesz

“The moment always dictates in my work. What I feel, I do. This is the most important thing for me, Everybody can look, but they don’t necessarily see. I never calculate or consider; I see a situation and I know that it’s right, even if I have to go back to get the proper lighting.”- Andre Kertesz

“I am an amateur and intend to remain one my whole life long. I attribute to photography the task of recording the real nature of things, their interior, their life. The photographer’s art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time. A photograph draws its beauty from the truth with which it’s marked. For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my career. As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record it truthfully. Look at the reporters and at the amateur photographer! They both have only one goal; to record a memory or a document. And that is pure photography. – Andre Kertesz

“The most valuable things in a life are a man’s memories. And they are priceless.” – Andre Kertesz

“I do not document anything, I give an interpretation.” – Andre Kertesz

“Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.” – Andre Kertesz

Waking Dream

I wish we had a walking distance downtown supermarket. I'd run out to buy parsley and other perishable produce in the middle of making dinner.

Blackout Curtain

I believe my sleep quality and moods have improved ever since I hung a black cloth over the window last winter making total darkness in my bedroom.

I read about this for years and dismissed it. One winter day when I needed to have a nap on a sunny day I hung the black cloth and never took it off. My spring usually is a devastating depression and I can't believe I made it thru April (the cruelest month) without major blues.

Dream

A woman was holding a large gray rabbit while it drank water out of a bowl. Another person came over and sprayed it's neck with PAM non-stick cooking spray. They were going to drop the rabbit in a pot of boiling water to cook it like a lobster. I woke up.

On this date in 1840

On this date in 1840, the first official adhesive postage stamp was issued in Great Britain. Up until the late 1830s, the recipient of the letter was supposed to pay upon delivery. Rates were inconsistent: postage was calculated based on number of sheets of paper, and the distance from sender to recipient. The rules were complicated and postage was expensive, and people often refused to pay, costing the government a lot of money. A schoolmaster named Rowland Hill developed a new system that established uniform postal rates based on weight. The sender would pay with stamps that cost a penny each. The design of the first stamp was an engraved profile of Queen Victoria on a black background, called the Penny Black. Since Britain was the first country to use prepaid postage stamps, they have never printed the name of their country on their stamps, just a portrait of the reigning monarch.
-Writer's Almanac

Spring Prescience

pre·scient
/ˈpreSH(ē)ənt/
adjective
adjective: prescient

having or showing knowledge of events before they take place.
"a prescient warning"
synonyms: prophetic, predictive, visionary; More
psychic, clairvoyant;
far-seeing, far-sighted, with foresight, prognostic, divinatory, oracular, sibylline, apocalyptic, fateful, revelatory;
insightful, intuitive, perceptive, percipient;
rareforeknowing, previsional, vatic, mantic, vaticinal, vaticinatory, prognosticative, augural, adumbrative, fatidic, fatidical, haruspical, pythonic
"much of what happened was predicted in Leonard's prescient article"

Origin
prescience noun
pre·​science | \ ˈpre-sh(ē-)ən(t)s
, ˈprē-, -s(ē-)ən(t)s\
Definition of prescience

: foreknowledge of events:
a : divine omniscience
b : human anticipation of the course of events : foresight

Synonyms for prescience

Synonyms

foreknowledge, foresight
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Did You Know?

If you know the origin of "science," you already know half the story of "prescience." "Science" comes from the Latin verb scire, which means "to know" and which is the source of many English words ("conscience," "conscious," and "omniscience," just to name a few). "Prescience" comes from the Latin verb praescire, which means "to know beforehand." "Praescire" joins the verb "scire" with the prefix prae-, a predecessor of "pre-." A lesser-known "scire"-derived word is "nescience." Nescience means "ignorance" and comes from "scire" plus "ne-," which means "not" in Latin.
Examples of prescience in a Sentence
He predicted their response with amazing prescience. Her prescience as an investor is impressive.