HARMOGE (apfioyb). A term employed by painters to express the union and blending of two adjacent tints imperceptibly and harmoniously together. Plin. H. N. xxxv. 11.

(See notes)

www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/145979192...

  

I appreciate your visit. - Harold

San Francisco bay area, California, USA

 

------------ +----+---- +---------===< ( * ) >===-----------+----+----+------------

My Nature pictures are linked to www.inaturalist.org/people/harmoge

 

"Every day, we collectively take 4.1 billion photographs..."

- www.bbc.com/future/article/20220905-is-the-world-overpopu...

- riseaboveresearch.com/rar-reports/2022-worldwide-image-ca...

 

"....an internal Flickr algorithm that determines which [Explore] photos are interesting to our community."

- flickrhelp.com

 

"'How sad it is' murmured Dorian Gray, with his eyes still fixed upon his portrait. 'How said is, I shall grow old and horrid and dreadful but this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. If it was only the other way! If it were I who was always to be young, and it was the picture who was to grow old for this, for this I would give everything . Yes, there is nothing in the world I would not give.' "

- Oscar Wilde - Portrait of Dorian Gray

 

"Old dreams--were they, as my shadow had speculated, the vestiges of people's hearts that had been scraped away and put into storage? I had no way of knowing if that theory was right or wrong. From my perspective it was just "microcosmic chaos." Are our hearts really that unclear and inconsistent? Maybe these old dreams could only emit bits and pieces of confused messages because they were nothing more than remnant s of an old mind coming together?"

- Haruki Murakami - The City and Its Uncertain Walls

 

"NEIL SHUBIN: Yeah. If you’re not failing, you’re not succeeding. And you have to take those chances, and you have to learn from those failures."

www.sciencefriday.com/segments/icy-ends-of-the-earth-book...

 

ANDREA BARRETT: "A kinder word for this process, by which I’ve made both my work and my life, is “revision.” Disaster, mess, slightly less mess; small improvement, two steps back, a swerve, and another small improvement."

harpers.org/archive/2025/01/energy-of-delusion-andrea-bar...

 

“…it could be explained by prior research showing that sensory stimuli are always made up of partial information—the things we see are assembled into images only after the brain has knitted together input from several sources. When we look at an ordinary sidewalk, for example, we may perceive different images depending on ambient temperature, scents like recently mowed grass, or even the leftover residue in our mouths from our latest meal.”

medicalxpress.com/news/2024-08-reveals-orange-netting-pac...

 

"The way we live now is an experiment in which we are human subjects -- treated as objects by the technology we have created. Our apps use us as much as we use our apps."

- Sherry Turkle, author of The Empathy Diaries - A Memoir - 2021 Penguin Press

 

“In all the activities of life, our whole effort must be to get out of our own light.”

- Aldous Huxley - The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

- from www.themarginalian.org/2015/07/22/aldous-huxley-who-are-w...

 

Can one make great art when comfortable?

“Impossible.”

Artist-dissident Ai Weiwei gets ‘incorrect’ during an appearance at The Town Hall in Manhattan

- apnews.com/article/ai-weiwei-zodiac-4fad2a250b471c581b5bf...

 

"So sometimes, it’s not about hoarding every moment as much as being able to value the experiences you’ve had. Because if you have one experience that is valuable that you could draw upon later on from the past week, that’s a whole lot better than mindlessly documenting everything you’ve ever done for the last week, right? And that’s going to be more personally meaningful to you, I think, in terms of anchoring you in where you’re going in your journey in life."

Atlantic Magazine - Can We Keep Time? Do photos, social posts, and diaries actually help us remember better? By Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost

www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/01/can-we-keep-...

 

"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”

— Ansel Adams; see www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/tips-and-solutio...

 

"Consulting the rules of photography before taking a photo is like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk."

- Edward Weston

 

"The polymath John Herschel, nephew of the trailblazing astronomer Caroline Herschel, coined the word photography in 1839 in his correspondence with Henry Fox Talbot — a onetime aspiring artist turned amateur inventor.... On March 12, he read before the Royal Society a paper titled “Note on the Art of Photography or the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purposes of Pictorial Representation” — the first public utterance of the word photography."

from Maria Popova's blog/webpage The Marginalian

www.themarginalian.org/2019/04/03/virginia-woolf-julia-ma... (Nice history of photography)

 

Stages of a photographer (learning curve): www.bailwardphotography.com/blog/photography-image-rating...

 

“The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees.”

― Proust, Marcel

 

"Six studies, including an analysis of field data (14,725 Instagram photos by a top travel influencer) and five controlled experiments, find that the presence (vs. absence) of another human in the photo of an identity-relevant experience (e.g., a vacation, a wedding) can lower viewers' liking and preference for the venue (i.e., the vacation destination, the wedding venue) in the photo. This effect is mediated by viewers' feelings of others' ownership of the venue and moderated by the relevance of the experience to the viewer’s self-identity as well as the distinctiveness of the human in the photo."

phys.org/news/2023-10-social-media-photos-customers.html

academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093...

 

“Images without people on them are unable to tell a human story,” added Corner. In fact, a survey found that human faces in particular bring out empathy in a way nothing else does.

- www.treehugger.com/climate-change/why-sustainability-phot...

 

"From the very first post about the New Aesthetic I have been talking about what these images reveal about the underlying systems that produce them, and/or the human viewpoint which frames them. It is impossible for me, with an academic background in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, with a practical background in literary editing and software programming, with a lifetime of interacting with the internet and other systems, not to look at these images and immediately start to think about not what they look like, but how they came to be and what they become: the processes of capture, storage, and distribution; the actions of filters, codecs, algorithms, processes, databases, and transfer protocols; the weight of datacenters, servers, satellites, cables, routers, switches, modems, infrastructures physical and virtual; and the biases and articulations of disposition and intent encoded in all of these things, and our comprehension of them. "

James Bridle's blog - Booktwo.org, The New Aesthetics and its Politics, June 12, 2013

booktwo.org/notebook/new-aesthetic-politics/

 

"We do not see the world in the way we see scenes in photographs. Skilled photographers exercise a significant degree of control over the content and production of photographs in a large number of ways, both before the shutter closes and afterwards."

Daniel Star associate professor of philosophy at Boston University.

aeon.co/essays/an-individual-cannot-be-captured-in-a-phot...

 

"When asked what he wants to shoot next, he said in the interview, "I don't know. Ask that moment in time."

Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama dies at 83 - 1/8/2024 -

mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240105/p2g/00m/0et/022000c

 

"...using a standalone digital camera [vs say an iPhone] immediately enhances the meaningfulness of an experience. Meaning is about exercising choice, and nowadays most people don’t own a camera at all – they just use their smartphone.

Digital cameras also enable presence: You need to remember to carry the camera around, and in return it won’t give you notifications or show you other apps while you’re shooting."

- Tim Gorichanaz - Assistant Teaching Professor of Information Studies, Drexel University theconversation.com/why-are-so-many-gen-z-ers-drawn-to-ol...

 

Miksang photography: "Normally, we limit the meaning of perceptions…in other words, we fit what we see into a comfortable or familiar scheme. We shut any vastness or possibilities of deeper perception out of our hearts by fixating on our own interpretation of phenomena. But it is possible to go beyond personal interpretation, to let vastness into our hearts through the medium of perception."

www.miksang.com/getting-to-the-point-with-chogyam-trunpa/

www.flickr.com/photos/130010035@N04/albums/72177720301591400

 

“Photography is one of the most effective and powerful tools we have to tell complex stories, like the story of climate change,”

- www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/05/20-climate-ph...

 

“All photos are accurate, none of them is the truth.”-

Richard Avedon. www.gokhantanriover.com/all-photos-are-accurate-none-of-t...

 

"This is the dance of anthropocentrism: transparency does not equate to understanding; seeing does not mean knowing or dominating. All too often we mistake one for the other. We thoughtlessly assume that by observing the world, we fix it into knowable forms, but timelapse reveals the nature of the world is changeable."

- James Bridle author Ways of Being 2022 Picador (Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC)

 

“The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing… but an awareness of its having–been–there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction of the here-now and the there-then."

- Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” reproduced in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 44.

 

“…the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images.”

- Susan Sontag - see owlcation.com/humanities/Literary-Interpretation-and-Anal...

 

"We human beings are, above all, visual creatures. Our sense of vision, of course, and in a host of less obvious ways our deepest modes of thought, are conditioned by our interaction with light. Each of us, for example, is born to become an accomplished, if unconscious, practitioner of projective geometry. That ability is hardwired into our brain. It is what allows us to interpret the two-dimentional image that arrives on our retinas as representing a world object in three-dimentional space."

- Frank Wilczek author A Beautiful Question

 

"Here we show that the presence of different odors influences how humans perceive color," said lead author Dr. Ryan Ward...

"Vision is dominant in our multisensory perception and can influence how we perceive information in our other senses, including olfaction. We explored the effect that different odors have on human color perception by presenting olfactory stimuli while asking observers to adjust a color patch to be devoid of hue (neutral gray task)."

www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1175703/full

 

"But the results are manifestations of my truths and the truths of others, and in the moment of making it, it feels true even though it was composed."

- from Orion Article: Photographer Leanne Dunic Wants to Misdirect Your Eye

orionmagazine.org/article/leanne-dunic-photography-winter...

 

"Photographs are relics of the past, traces of what has happened. If the living take the past upon themselves, if the past becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history, then all photographs would reacquire a living context, they would continue existing in time, instead of being arrested moments. It is just possible that photography is the prophesy of a human memory yet to be socially or politically achieved. Such a memory would encompass any image of the past, however tragic, however guilty, within its own continuity. The distinction between private and public uses of photography would be transcended. The Family of Man would exist."

- John Berger sites.uni.edu/fabos/seminar/readings/berger.pdf

 

"The most interesting sort of photography is the sort that portrays the dirty reality of the world."

- www.flickr.com/people/mingthein/

 

"We can only think of the present moment, but the present moment is always awash in memories and ideas produced by the past...History is looking into the tangled and devilishly complicated connection between an infinity of moments. The relationship of those moments is what matters.

The historians premise applies equally well to photography... We tend to look at [photographs] not just sequentially but relationally."

- Richard White author California Exposures.

wwnorton.com/books/9780393243062

 

"…And, pressing of the Undefined

The definition on my mind,

Held up before my eyes a glass

Through which my shrinking sight did pass

Until it seemed I must behold

Immensity made manifold;"

- 'Renascence' - Edna St. Vincent Millay.

 

"I think that photographers have a lot of fun needling the absurdity out of everyday life, trying to see something that others overlook, but the pandemic has laid everything bare. I think it’s a golden age for photojournalism, and there’s been so much incredible work on that front this year. For photographers like myself who are a little bit more conceptual, it seems like a time to take a backseat and think about our practice. Everything is so literal right now; it doesn’t feel like there’s a second layer to uncover visually."

- www.buzzfeednews.com/article/piapeterson/chris-maggio-pho... Dec 2021

 

"Images that depict 'the everyday' make it become a more personal issue. Researchers O’Neill and Cole found that, “Climate change images that take into account a person’s values, attitudes, beliefs, local environment, and experiences are important in creating meaningful engagement.”

- tyndall.ac.uk/news/can-photography-change-way-we-see-clim...

 

"[Virginia Wolf] couldn’t have — or could she have? — envisioned what would become of photography as the technology became commonplace over the coming decades, much less what digital photography would bring. But her insight holds true — the easier it becomes to convey a message in a certain medium, the less selective we grow about what that message contains, and soon we are conveying the trifles and banalities of our day-to-day life, simply because it is effortless to fill the page (or feed, or screen, or whatever medium comes next)."

from Maria Popova's blog/webpage The Marginalian

www.themarginalian.org/2019/04/03/virginia-woolf-julia-ma...

 

"To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice."

- Sally Mann's Exposure www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/magazine/the-cost-of-sally-man...

 

"A new study has identified the impact that fleeting natural events, such as sunrises and sunsets, can have on people, and sought to quantify their effects. Researchers used the latest computer graphics to show carefully controlled images of both urban and natural environments to more than 2,500 participants. When these scenes featured elements such as sunrise and sunset, participants considered them to be substantially more beautiful than when seen under sunny conditions at any other time of day. Unexpectedly, the paper revealed that sunrise and sunset could also trigger significant boosts in people's feelings of awe."

- Alexander J. Smalley, Mathew P. White. Beyond blue-sky thinking: Diurnal patterns and ephemeral meteorological phenomena impact appraisals of beauty, awe, and value in urban and natural landscapes. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2023; 101955 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.101955 University of Exeter. "New research quantifies the 'wow' factor of sunrise and sunset." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 19 January 2023. ..

 

“…looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brains some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin étude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.”

- Douglas Hofstadter from the book I Am A Strange Loop., copywrite 2007 Basic Books, Perseus Book Group

 

"What did the photographer hope for when he pressed the shutter? To hold the world accountable, perhaps; or maybe, simpler, to bear witness. Something, some intention, some expectation had been there, and also Bulla’s devotion to his craft."

- Emergence Magazine - emergencemagazine.org/essay/to-see-beyond/

 

"The final strength in really great photographs is that they suggest more than what they show literally. Photography and poetry both centered on metaphor... I also want to show what is disturbing and what what needs correction. The best way to do that and it is the way every artist dreams of, is to show it at the same time, in the very same rectangle. The effort is to find the perfectly balanced frame where everything fits. it is not exactly the same as life, it is life seen better...the decision to make a photograph is a kind of seduction, and the seduction is worked by light. Many times, many times, thousands of exposures were made in the state of helplessness. I simply had to do that. There is nothing that could keep me from pressing the trigger.... There are a lot of surprises in photography and if you are not interested in surprises, you should not be a photographer. It is one of the great, enlivening, blessings of the medium....Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world, but I don't think we can get along without it, it is a confirmation of meaning in life...."

- Robert Adams art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s4/robert...

 

"Even though photography may still capitalize on its primary function as a memory tool for documenting a person’s past, we are witnessing a significant shift, especially among the younger generation, toward using it as an instrument for interaction and peer bonding."

- José Van Dijck “Mediated Memories in the Digital Age”: www.sup.org/books/title/?id=10395

 

"Idle reader [viewer], may you believe me without any oath, that I would want this book [photo], the child of my brain, to be the most beautiful, the happiest, the most brilliant imaginable. But I could not contravene the the law of nature according to which like begets like."

First few lines of Don Quixote - Cervantes.

 

"La Nature est un temple oû de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L’homme y passé à travers des forêts de symbols

Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers."

- Charles Baudelaire - “Correspondences”

 

”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. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.”

- Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

"Indeed, our relationship with photographs is rapidly changing. As we snap, store and communicate with thousands of images on our phones and computers, a number of researchers and theorists are already beginning to point to some of the unintended consequences of this “image overload,” which range from heightened anxiety to memory impairment."

- theconversation.com/exposed-to-a-deluge-of-digital-photos...

 

« Our perception of subtle concordance's dance may be in the void. »

« Two important points in art: the dazzling of the hesitation and the dazzling of the control. »

- Nicolas de Staël

 

"I set off but as I walked I remembered that my clothes, my shoes, and even my skin felt heavy. Every step I took required more effort than the previous one. When I reached Ramblas, I noticed that the city had become frozen as in a never-ending instant. Passersby had stopped in their tracks and become motionless, like figures in an old photograph. A pigeon taking flight left only a hint of blurred outline as it flapped its wings. Motes of sparkling dust floated in the air like powdered light. The water of the Canaletas fountain glistened in the void, suspended like a necklace of glass tears."

- Carlos Ruiz Zafon - 'The Labyrinth of the Spirits'

 

"So paint your longing. Even if not literally, you can use the Rockwell formula in your own life to bring more joy to yourself and the people around you when you are down."

www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/03/making-people-...

 

"As the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen recently said in the art magazine Frieze: “Something fundamental is changing in the world of images, and in the landscape of seeing more generally. We are at the point (actually, probably long past) where the majority of the world’s images are made by-machines-for-machines. In this new age, robot-eyes, seeing-algorithms and imaging-machines are the rule, and seeing with the meat-eyes of our human bodies is increasingly the exception..”

www.frieze.com/issue/article/safety-in-numbers/

 

“Context is everything…The light that falls onto your eyes, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean anything…There is no inherent meaning in information. It’s what we do with that information that matters. So, how do we see? Well, we see by learning to see. The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world.”

- Beau Lotto, neuroscientist (taken from magazine Alpinist | 54 Summer 2016)

 

"This is where online engagement seems to exercise its special charm. Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection. The screen acts as a kind of protective membrane, a scrim that allows invisibility and transformation. You can filter your image, concealing unattractive elements, and you can emerge enhanced: an online avatar designed to attract likes. But now a problem arises, for the contact this produces is not the same thing as intimacy. Curating a perfected self might win followers or Facebook friends, but it will not necessarily cure loneliness, since the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person – ugly, unhappy and awkward, as well as radiant and selfie-ready."

www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/01/future-of-lonelin...

 

"The writer hides like a photographer behind the camera, affecting impartiality and detachment behind an objective camera, but what is projected is still self-love and self-pity, masturbation and sadism. The eye with its pretense of neutrality is driven by all sorts of desires, and what is manifested is tinged with aesthetic taste, while claiming to look with indifference upon the world.

As you are photographing, you will pity yourself, and you must find a state of mind that will allow you to endure the pain so that you can go on living to create a realm that is purely yours, that is beyond the pig's pen of reality. "

- Gao Xingjian 高行建 One Man's Bible 一個人生經 Nobel Prize Literature HarperCollins 1999, 2002

 

"I could, however, try to express my solipsism in a different way: I imagine that I and others draw pictures or write descriptions of what each of us sees. These descriptions are put before me. I point to the one which I have made and say, 'only this is (or was) really seen'. That is, I am tempted to say: 'Only this description has reality (visual reality) behind it'. The others I might call -- 'blank descriptions'. I could also express myself saying: 'This description only was derived from reality; only this was compared with reality'. Now it has a clear meaning when we say that this picture or description is a projection, say of this group of objects--the trees I look at--or that it has been derived from these objects. But we must look into the grammar of such a phrase as 'this description is derived from my sense datum'. What we are talking about is connected with that peculiar temptation to say: "I never know what the others really means by 'brown', or what he really sees when he (truthfully) says that he sees a brown object' ...

- Ludwig Wittgenstein - The Blue and Brown Books, copyright 1958 by Basil Blackwell,Harper Paperback Ed. 1965.

 

"...Neuroscientists assure us the each time we open our eyes, billions of neurons and trillion of synapes spring into action. Roughly one-third of our cortex, one-third of our most advance computing power in engaged in vision—which is not what you may expect if seeing is just a matter of shooting videos. Cameras after all, were filming long before the era of the computer. So what in the world is the brain computing when we look and why? "

....

"....One trifle in the search for beauty is a feature of the human eye called the limbal ring, a dark annulus at the border between the colored iris and the white sclera. I first noticed this ring in the Afgan Girl, a photograph of Sharbat Guls that graced the June 1985 cover of National Geographic and became the most recognized photo in the magazine's history.... Why might the prominent limbal rings be attractive?...In principle,... limbal rings signal youth, health and thus [evolutionary] fitness...."

- Donald Hoffman - Author: The Case Against Reality - Why Evolution hid Truth from our Eyes.

cf: www.flickr.com/photos/forpaws/2321906332/in/photolist-4xb...

 

"One of the chief paradoxes of photography is that though it seems to be uniquely empowered to function as a medium of realism, it does so only rarely and under special circumstances, often behaving as if reality were something to be avoided at all costs. If “the camera can’t lie,” neither is it inclined to tell the truth, since it can reflect only the usually ambiguous, and sometimes outright deceitful, surface of reality. "

- Janet Malcom www.newyorker.com/magazine/1976/10/18/the-view-from-plato...

 

"Scientific attempts to reduce colors to wavelengths have been equally unsuccessful. If it were simple, then colors as we observe them should match up with what’s called the “surface spectral reflectance,” (SSR) which can be measured with a digital receptor. But if you try to replicate color vision this way, you get far too many colors, and objects lack internal constancy because of the effects of lighting conditions. Where we see shadows, a computer sees a different color. But even when they apply highly sophisticated algorithms for illumination in a 3-D space, researchers have been unable to replicate human levels of color constancy. NYU professor of psychology and neural science Laurence T. Maloney writes that the failure of these SSR models thus far suggests “there are cues present in real scenes that we do not understand.” People are able to use color to judge scenes better than computers and cameras can, and scientists aren’t sure how."

- 'Does Color Even Exist? What you see is only what you see' By Malcolm Harris May 21, 2015 - The New Republic newrepublic.com/article/121843/philosophy-color-perception

 

"When thinking about human tetrachromats [i.e., 4 color vision, vs. the more typical human trichromats] and erato butterfles, I’m struck by how absurd it is that people once thought all animals saw the same spectrum as humans. Humans don’t even see the same colors as each other. We have varying form of partial or complete colorblindness. Some of us are tetrachomats. Look across the rest of the animal kingdom and you’ll find even greater variations…"

- 'An Immense World' by Ed Yong, Random House copyright 2022

 

"The character 青 (qīng) describes color: 青天 (qīngtiān) for the sky, 青山 (qīngshān) for the mountains, 青丝(qīngsī) for hair , 青眼 (qīngyǎn) for eyes… One color can be used to describe all of these different entities. What color is 青 anyway? When used with different nouns to form fixed words and phrases, qing could be green, blue, or close to black."

- Tuesday, June 4, 2013 | By: Weijing Zhu www.theworldofchinese.com/2013/06/what-color-is-qing/

 

"A lot of factors feed into how people perceive and talk about color, from the biology of our eyes to how our brains process that information, to the words our languages use to talk about color categories. There’s plenty of room for differences, all along the way."

knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2022/science-of-color-p...

 

"I find the experience of close, extended looking and thoughtful response to be a great challenge, but also the most freeing experience. For me, deep focus on the external world is a means to transcend the limitations of the self for a kind of awakening and a deeper presence to our experience....The possibility of transformation is a subject in both my painting process and in the landscape subjects I choose to paint; it is my form and my content. Light and atmosphere's ability to transform the physical is my most valued metaphor for conveying our longing for deep freedom and oneness with the world around us and beyond."

- Yaz Krehbiel painter www.yazkrehbiel.com/statement

 

"Thus, long before [physicist] C.T.R. Wilson turned his camera on the microphysical world, he had used it to create the natural world, especially the crags, cliffs, and clouds of Scotland. Later, Wilson took his camera with him on his hikes to Ben Nevis and elsewhere, and, alongside scientific notes, inscribed his notebook with the circumstance of each individual exposure. The immense popularity of such amateur nature photography was a notable feature of Victorian Britain and in general, British photography occupied a 'stylistic and conceptual midpoint between French and American photography of the nineteenth century.' Where American photographers were for the most part scientists and entrepreneur and the French tended to come from some the ranks of painters, the Victorian amateurs, 'compromise[d] between the two extremes...successfully manag[ing] to blend emotional evocation with an objective assertion of sheer physical fact.'"

- Millard "Images" (1977) 23-24. P84 From the book Images & Logic by Peter Galison

 

“It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!”

― Thomas Mann

 

"Images have power. As a form of language, visual data influences the way we create social meaning and share cultural knowledge. Seeing and then interpreting what we see is critical to our understanding the world from a particular lens or worldview.

Additionally, images have an ability to communicate beyond the power or necessity of words. It is true that a picture can be worth a thousand words, particularly in contemporary cultures that are visually driven. Images offer “thick descriptions” of people, events, places, and particular moments in time....Images also offer first-person perspectives on historical events that help us see and understand from different points of view. Photographs allow us to immerse ourselves in the histories and moments caught in a camera’s lens. Photographs can be objects or works of art. They can be a form of archival texts that document time, or windows into different cultures and worlds from our past. I like to think that photographs can bear witness. They provide visual evidence of a culture as a testament to our nation’s history."

- Aaron Bryant, one of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.’s curators insider.si.edu/2016/09/building-grand-photography-collect...

 

"For as long as I can recall, I have felt as if certain photos were drawing me—the texture of light playing on sensitive grain, the sharpness or fuzz of the lines setting a figure off from its surroundings, the illusion of deep space in a flat field, and the way a slice of time seems to live forever—as if photos had volition, 'as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us,' as W. G. Sebald put it in Austerlitz. Though 'photograph' means 'sun drawing,' giving the light all the agency isn’t quite right. Whatever a photo has to show is to be found in the shadows, where things dissolve into each other."

emergencemagazine.org/essay/of-wandering-angels-and-lost-...

www.daeganmiller.com/notes-on-lost-landmarks

 

"We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and our faces, thoughts and feelings are worthy to be recorded."

- Maria Vladimirskaya www.flickr.com/people/zeiford/

 

"The eye sees; the camera observes," the photographer explained. "Like it?"

"It's astonishing," Alice admitted.

"This is just the composition and perspective. The secret is in the light. You must look through the lens, imagining there will be a liquid glow. The shadow will be tinged by a soft, evanescent layer, as if it had been raining light...."

- The Labyrinth of the Spirits - by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

 

"Whatever person you decide to photograph, or whatever thing, you must go on photographing it always, exclusively, at every hour of the day or night. Photography has meaning only if it exhausts all possible images."

- The Adventure of a Photographer - Italo Calvino beauty.gmu.edu/AVT459/AVT459-001/Calvino.pdf

 

"A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it-by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir ...Unsure of other responses they stop to take a photograph, and move on. This gives shape to the experience: stop, take a photograph and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic - Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun..."

- On Photography - Susan Sontag www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt...

 

"A photograph, whilst recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen."

- John Berger = "Understanding a Photograph" in Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things, 1972 macobo.com/essays/epdf/berger_understanding_a_photograph.pdf

 

"A well-executed game farm photograph can be nearly indistinguishable from a real wildlife photo, one reason critics consider such images problematic. Traditional wildlife photographers can spend days researching conditions of the field environment before heading out to shoot. They may camp out for weeks, or return to the same spot many times over the years looking for the same animal before getting the shot of a lifetime. But game farms allow both pros and hobbyists to produce in a few hours what otherwise takes weeks to achieve in the wild."

- qz.com/969811/game-farm-photography-love-wildlife-photos-...

 

"While large scale representations of nature are often meant to invoke reverence, I am looking for something else here. For a redwood, bigness is one of its essential characteristics. Bigness is about itself, rather than a display of awe. Paradoxically, the scale also allows for a physical intimacy and relationship with the texture and form of the trees."

- www.sarahbirdstudio.com/writing

 

"For one thing, her images revisit the conventions of portraiture to suggest that, like people, redwoods are hardly all alike. But these are portraits that do not ennoble their subjects. We see trees with their root systems precariously exposed to the air—their futures as uncertain as our own. We see minute details of exteriors we could never have perceived had we been present at the spot. We see tree parts that challenge us to imagine the organic whole that yet defies our capacities to register wholeness. We find ourselves too close and too far to take in parts and wholes at once. And yet Bird shows us how we might map our relation as humans to whatever may be both too near and too distant."

- How do we look at trees? What do we see in them? Charismatic Mega-Flora by Andrew Parker, French and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University

 

"No writer alone. Whatever the degree of solitude, the silent influence of seemingly long forgotten words is always at his elbow, and so are the men and women who spoke them. the [viewing] and reading of a lifetime converge his pages Filtered through the individuality of a writer's mind, the distant echos of experience become ever more insistent, until they make themselves known, and find form at his fingertips though they may never rise into full unveiled consciousness."

- (change "writer" to photographer) From the acknowledgements of Sherwin Nuland's 1997 book, 'The Wisdom of the body' Copyright 1997. Alfred A. Knopf. Inc. New York

 

"Art is man's teacher, but art is art's teacher. A poet usually finds his poetry in another poet. The process used to be called 'emulation', was admired and encouraged, but tumbled into disrepute from the Romantics to our day, when the red banner of Originality was carried to the barricades where it still stands. And, inevitably, it was long ago discovered that emulation is one of the most revolutionary forms of originality. The word 'invention', which once meant 'finding' rather than 'making from the scratch', now means 'finding' again. ...."

- 'The Geography of the Imagination', forty essays by Guy Davenport, Copyright 1981...1981; 1981 North Point Press, San Francisco

 

"As Kaja Silverman puts it, 'A photograph is the umbilical cord connecting us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we failed to save it, or to what might have been, but now will never be.' The 'Too Hard to Keep archive' is flush with photographs that index such a loss. But it also calls attention to the impasses faced by those who inhabit an 'afterness' where it is not only loss that is at stake, but also the loss of loss itself. Lazarus requires that the owners of photographs 'truly part' with the images they donate to his project."

- contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2015/06/too-hard-to-ke...

toohardtokeep.blogspot.com/

 

"...I felt like I was stepping into my painting. The watercolor was like the lens through which I saw the place, a two dimensional frame of reference was now becoming a three dimensional diorama....To look closely at nature is to change one's scale constantly: from an appreciation of a horizon to a heavy bumblebee heavily stepping among goldenrod blooms, from an aster opening its flowers to the poised, on the rolling ridge on which it grew. A shelter can be as small as a creature looking for safety can allow it to be.... But while animals, humans included, are clever at finding shelter in the small, we are also great at looking for the tremendous, the gratuitous sweep of a river valley, the ocean, the prairie without fences. There is a value in the expanse that can't be counterfeited even in the most detailed, magnified look at the small. We want to be comforted not just for today, but without bounds."

- Conor Gearin (from "Little Golden Flower-Room: On Wild Places and Intimacy" - in "2019 The Best American Science and Nature Writing")

 

"If you start to shoot, be prepared not to talk to anybody."

- Caroline Gray from interview in Blog.lobster.media www.flickr.com/people/caroline_gray/

 

"When we speak of using minimal subject matter in a photo, we are often thinking about negative space. ... The Japanese spatial concept of ma (間)...expresses this in even more interesting, meaningful and valuable ways...as a consideration of seeing, hearing and, perhaps, feeling and expressing (a) the intervals and emptiness of space; (b) the void between all things; (c) a pause in time; and (d) a simultaneous experience of form and non-form.....Ma speaks as much of what is not there, what is not said or expressed, as it does for what is there. ... the experience of the non-form, whether conscious or unconscious, bound to the experience of the form and the experience of the form bound to the non-form....It speaks of something beyond intent or specific understanding, coming instead from something within a creator or viewer, for it resides in the spaces between; it resides in silence...And if I must utter what photography is about for me, it is about invoking silence."

- minimalismmag.com/2019/04/16/interview-nathan-wirth/

www.flickr.com/people/nlwirth/

 

"Might photography with its receptivity to surfaces and its 'lovely naivete' of appearance, be the least compromised route to a plant's individuality? But, then again, are the superficial details of color and form really pointers to its character, its strategy for living, so that in them - as in the Romantic's poems on nature - 'the optical becomes the visionary'? Forgetting for a moment plant's intangible associations, many strictly vegetal qualities don't lie within what we'd normally regard as the 'optical': relationships with cryptic geological features, for instance, invisible but chemical chemical communications with insects and other vegetation. Plants also have a special relationship with time that makes photography's unique ability to 'freeze the moment' of little significance. Their immobility and periods of slow growth can make one moment in their lives appear barely distinguishable from the next. Their shapes and places of habitation, such critical aspects of their identity, often result from historical processes involving natural and human pressures which stretch over hundreds or thousands of years. John Berger has written of the fundamental difference between photography and painting in representing time. If photography can stop time, freeze it, representational painting contains it, not just because its making takes time, and therefore incorporates it, but because it can hint at what might have gone at before and might come after. Might it be possible for the photograph of a plant to have something of painterly quality, and record not just the isolated moment but suggest the organism's past and the invisible dynamics of its life?"

- from "The Cabaret of Plants" by Richard Mabley 2015

 

"Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference."

- Photographer Robert Frank

www.atgetphotography.com/The-Photographers/Robert-Frank.html

 

"After the NASA work, {Richard] Taylor [nanoparticle physicist] went deeper. He and Caroline Haggerhall, a Swedish environmental psychologist with a specialty in human aesthetic perception, converted a series of nature photos into a simplistic representation of land forms' fractal silhouettes against the sky. They found that people overwhelmingly preferred images with a low to mid-range D (1.3 to 1.5)["D" measures the ratio of the large course patterns to the fine ones in fractals]. Did preference measure some sort of mental state? To find out, they used EEG to measure peoples brain waves while viewing geometric images. They discovered that in that same dimensional 'magic zone,' the subjects' frontal lobes easily produced those elusive and prized alpha brain waves of a wakefully relaxed state. This occurred in people who looked at the images for only one minute."

- Page 114-5 2018 W. W. Norton & Company Paperback. "The Nature Fix - Why Nature makes us Happier, Healthier and more Creative" by Florence Williams Copyright 2017

Also see Ms Williams article in the Atlantic: www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/why-fractals-...

and: around.uoregon.edu/oq/the-curse-of-jackson-pollock-the-tr...

 

"Long exposure photography is a curious trick, one that allows me to capture something that is not immediately perceivable: a condensed slice of time if you will...Indeed when when one stands in this single spot, one witnesses, the flux of time itself."

- Nathan Wirth Essay - sliceofsilence.com/blog/eye-silence

 

[photography captures the "present" moment of time but...]

"Strangely, although we feel as if we sweep through time on the knife-edge between the fixed past and the open future, that edge—the present—appears nowhere in the existing laws of physics. ... At the quantum scale, irreversible changes occur that distinguish the past from the future: A particle maintains simultaneous quantum states until you measure it, at which point the particle adopts one of the states. Mysteriously, individual measurement outcomes are random and unpredictable, even as particle behavior collectively follows statistical patterns. This apparent inconsistency between the nature of time in quantum mechanics and the way it functions in relativity has created uncertainty and confusion...."

- www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/04/passage-of-ti...

 

"It was really, really hard to be completely honest with myself, and it still is. I love the win, the attention, the likes…but if that is the reason why I create, then my work will not fulfill me and it will fail to convey conviction to the viewer."

- colethompsonphotography.com/blog/

www.flickr.com/photos/colethompsonphotography/

 

"It strikes me that this movement both outside the self and at the same time further into one’s personal history is exactly what poetry accomplishes. And what I’ve now learned, visual art can also do. There’s a fancy word for writing about visual art: ekphrasis. It derives from the Greek and literally means to “speak out.” Yes, I believe pictures do speak although it’s a trick to hear what they truly want to tell us. ... The viewer can never know what comes next in this {photograph of a] hungry child’s life. Perhaps this is part of the mystery that elevates art and makes the ordinary so extraordinary."

— By poet Susan Rich around.uoregon.edu/oq/entering-the-picture-the-photograph...

 

"We begin with the simplest and most obvious; the physical objects that the outdoorsman may seek, find, capture, and carry away. In this category are the wild crops such as game and fish, and the symbols or tokens of achievement such as heads, hides, photographs, and specimens.

All these things rest upon the idea of the trophy, The pleasure they give is, or should be, in the seeking as well as the getting. The trophy ...is a certificate. It attest that the owner has been somewhere or done something - that he exercised skills, persistence or discrimination in the age-old feat of overcoming, outwitting, or reducing-to-possession. These connotations which attach to the trophy usually far exceed its physical value....

The disquieting thing in the modern picture is the trophy-hunter that never grows up, in whom the capacity for isolation, perception, and husbandry is undeveloped or perhaps lost... For him, the recreational engineer dilutes the wilderness and artificializes its trophies in the fond belief that he rendering a public good."

- A Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold

 

"Photography is a secret ceremony going back and forth between 'visible' and 'invisible'".

- www.flickr.com/people/toru-ukai-new/

 

"Neuroscientists assure us the each time we open our eyes, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses spring into action. Roughly one-third of the brain's cortex, one-third of our most advanced computing power, is engaged in vision - which is not what you may expect if seeing just a matter of shooting videos....So what in the world is the brain computing when we look, and why?"

- Donald Hoffman - Author: The Case Against Reality - Why Evolution hid Truth from our Eyes.

 

"... I love books that are just pictures. And.. you know, if there are words, let's stick them in the back or put them somewhere where they're not going to be too intrusive.... that is just my sort of philosophy. Because I think if you are really working between ideas and captions and explanations, you're brain is working from your verbal brain, it's not from working your visual sense. It's very hard if you are thinking about what something is to get a metaphor out of that. It is a different kind of opening of awareness, I think. So I like to sort of separate those things not to deprive somebody of where something is, they can go to the back of the book and find out or something....

...You really have to get your eyes open. Because the way you see photographically is really very different from the way you maneuver on a daily basis. And since I don't photographic the kind of events or little scenes I see in my every day life, I have to see the world, or the terrain, or the situation...I have to be open in a very a different way. It often takes a couple days, and it helps if you can do it for a chunk for time, rather than going in and out of that type of state.... I am not meditating or anything...it is not that. It's just, I have a friend that has a wonderful expression: you have your mind on "wide"... you're open, you're watching..."

- Interview with Linda Conner about her book Constellations www.store.datzpress.kr/publications/constellations

 

"Photography always beats me. The day when I understand what it is will be the day when I stop taking photographs, until then, I will still be a fool.

不想知道什么是摄影，只想摄影毁灭我"

- www.flickr.com/people/57356053@N07/

 

"Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum."

quote of Sally Mann from from Maria Popova's blog/webpage The Marginalian

www.themarginalian.org/2016/11/29/hold-still-sally-mann-m...

 

"It is the possibility of capturing a perfection in a photograph that keeps my passion high and my vision in harmony with Nature's solitude and beauty. Each time I set out to catch those fleeting moments, I feel the excitement and confident expectation that keeps my spirit filled with awe and inspiration."

- Patrick Paul Rene www.patrickpaulrene.com/portfolios

 

"Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again."

- Henri Cartier-Bresson

thx to www.flickr.com/photos/foxmg/49825390047/in/datetaken/

 

"....Pictures, as accurate mirrors of nature, just are. I can understand such an attitude directed towards photographs of objects - though opportunities for subtle manipulation are legion even here. But many of our pictures are incarnations masquerading as neutral descriptions of nature. These are the most potent sources of conformity, since ideas passing as descriptions lead us to equate the tentative with the factual. Suggestions for the organization of thought are transformed to established patterns in nature. Guess and hunches become things."

- Stephen Jay Gould- Wonderful Life.

 

"The Beautiful is always strange, it always contains a touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness, and it is that touch of strangeness that gives it its particular quality as Beauty."

- Charles Baudelaire arthistoryunstuffed.com/baudelaire-art-criticism/

 

"Traces of the dead surround us. The dead have made things, broken things, planted things, and killed things. The sum total of their actions, along with what we have added and what nature has provided constitutes our world. Our societies, economies politics, and cultures are composed mostly of what the dead have done. We, like our world, are their progeny. Subtract the works of the dead, and the world would be diminished and unrecognizable. This is why history matters. Without history, we are strangers in a strange land, never understanding what we are seeing and unable to grasp how it came to be there.

In everyday life, the past remains visible. It not only can be photographed, but virtually every photograph of our contemporary world is a historic photograph."

- Author Richard White in his book "California Exposures"

 

"...Now our love memories present no exception to the general rules of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general rules of Habit. And as Habit weakens every impression, what a person recalls to us most vividly is precisely what we have forgotten, because it was of no importance, and had therefore left in full possession of its strength. This is why the better part of our memory exists outside of ourselves, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate, wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all tears flow seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather within ourselves, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover that creature we were, range ourselves face to face with past events as the creature that had to face them, suffer afresh because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. In the broad daylight of our memory the images of the past turn pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of the them, we shall never find them again. Or rather we should never find them again had not a few words been carefully locked away in oblivion, just an author deposits in the Natural Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable."

- Marcel Proust -- Remembrances of Things Past -or- In Search of Lost Time, as it is now translated.

 

"For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of beauty without Eros, keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide."

- Thomas Mann

 

"The greater the equality of opportunity in a society becomes, the more obvious becomes the inequality of the talent and character among individuals, and the more bitter and personal it must be to fail, particularly for those who have some talent but not enough to them second or third place."

- W. H. Auden, "West's Decline"

 

"New research based on the study of more than 120 million photos posted on social media by people visiting different marine destinations delivers an answer: Tourists are generating more social media attention about marine protected areas than about neighbo