Tag: nudes

Daniel Mendelsohn: “There is Only Looking and Finding”

Photographers Unknown, There is Only Looking and Finding

“I did and do believe, after all that I’ve seen and done, that if you project yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something that would not otherwise have happened, you will find something, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn’t gone looking in the first place, if you hadn’t asked our grandfather anything at all…There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking and finally seeing, what was always there.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Herman Melville: “Passion in Its Profoundest”

Photographers Unknown, Images from the Black and White Collection

“Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd

Henri Cartier-Bresson: “To Photograph is to Hold One’s Breath”

Photographers Unknown, Ten Guys and Ten Cameras

“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

― Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye

Flowers and a Quote

Flowers and a Quote

“Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty.

Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother’s breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys—”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

The Color: White

Photographer Unknown, (The Color White)

The Inuit language has seven different words for seven different nuances of white. Sanskrit has specific words for bright white, the white of teeth, the white of sandalwood, the white of the autumn moon, the white of silver, the white of cow’s milk, the white of pearls, the white of a ray of sunlight, and the white of stars. Japanese has six different words, depending upon brilliance or dullness, or if the color is inert or dynamic.