Hi and welcome to Karma's Current.

 

My tag comes from a poem by the Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) translated by Roger Pulvers and quoted in New Scientist with a beaut Cartier-Bresson photo. I have made a few small changes for the sake of brevity and emphasis; and it works in a nice Flickr reference too.

 

"The phenomenon called I

Is but a single blue illumination

Of karma's alternating current lamp

Flickering unceasingly, restlessly

The light is preserved

After the lamp itself is lost."

 

Now clear off and take some photos while you still have some light!

 

Cheers, Johnny

 

And don't forget the flux capacitor - youtu.be/_MrRDiJa2s0

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On Street Photography:

 

Faces in the Street

 

"They lie, the men who tell us in a loud decisive tone

That want is here a stranger, and that misery’s unknown;

For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet

My window-sill is level with the faces in the street —

Drifting past, drifting past,

To the beat of weary feet —

While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street."

 

Henry Lawson, 1888, [a street photographer before his time]...

 

Read the rest at - simplyaustralia.net/poetry-hl-faces.html

 

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Collected Quotes

 

More on street photography - actually the Flâneur, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street as they were known in 19th-century, and even a nice flickr reference, a little OTT I know.

"The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life."

 Charles Baudelaire "The Painter of Modern Life". Orig. published in Le Figaro, in 1863.

 

Josef Koudelka

“I have to shoot three rolls of film a day, even when I’m not taking photographs, in order to train my eye.”

 

Garry Winogrand

“When asked how he felt about missing photographs while he reloaded his camera with film, he replied ‘There are no photographs while I'm reloading’”

 

“There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.”

 

Margaret Bourke-White

“The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.”

 

“If anyone gets in my way when I'm making a picture, I become irrational. I'm never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do --- only that I want that picture.”

 

[Yeah, we've all come across photographers like that!]

 

Susan Sontag

“I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do -- that was one of my favourite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse. “

 

Diane Arbus

“Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.”

 

Robert Doisneau

“A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there --- even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.”

 

“I'm not a collector at heart. I'm never tormented by the longing to possess things. I'm quite happy with my pictures. I've been cohabiting with them for years now and we know each other inside out, so I feel I'm entitled to say that pictures have a life and a character of their own. Lots of them behave like good little girls and give me a nice smile whenever I walk past, but others are real bitches and never miss any opportunity to ruin my life. I handle them with kid gloves.”

 

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.”

 

Paul Strand

“Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningfulness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.”

 

Dorothea Lange

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

 

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!’”

 

Robert Cappa

“If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.”

 

Elliott Erwitt

“Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy--the tone range isn't right and things like that--but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention.”

 

“You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.”

 

“I'm not a serious photographer like many of my contemporaries. That is to say, I am serious about not being serious.”

 

Robert Frank

“I've never been successful at making films, really. I've never been able to do it right. And there's something terrific about that. There's something good about being a failure--it keeps you going.”

 

Manuel Alvarez Bravo

“A photographer's main instrument is his eyes. Strange as it may seem, many photographers choose to use the eyes of another photographer, past or present, instead of their own. Those photographers are blind.”

 

www.atgetphotography.com/Selection/index.html