terrible cumulative force

The well-known critic, poet, and impresario Lincoln Kirstein, in an essay included as part of [Walker] Evans’s American Photographs, the catalogue for the artist’s landmark show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938, indicated how his friend’s gift as a photographer was that he could single out the specific, the particular, so as to suggest a shared, but often otherwise unrecognized commonality. “The power of Evans’s work,” Kirstein wrote, “lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets.” If Evans could lay bare the truth in one person, he could point it out in, and consequently for, everyone.

—Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity (Viking – Penguin Random House, 2023)

a certain relation

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

—Susan Sontag, “On Photography” (1977)

To write a poem is to appropriate the thing written about. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

created an equivalent

I simply function when I take a picture. I do not photograph with preconceived notions about life. I put down what I have to say when I must. That is my role, according to my own way of feeling it. Perhaps it is beyond feeling.

What is of greatest importance is to hold a moment, to record something so completely that those who see it will relive an equivalent* of what has been expressed.

[…]

I want solely to make an image of what I have seen, not of what it means to me. It is only after I have created an equivalent of what moved me that I can begin to think about its significance.

Shapes, as such, do not interest me unless they happen to be an outer equivalent of something already taking form within me. To many, shapes matter in their own right. As I see it, this has nothing to do with photography, but with the merely literary or pictorial.

—Alfred Stieglitz, quoted by Dorothy Norman in Alfred Stieglitz (The History of Photography Series, Aperture, Inc., 1976).

*After 1922 Stieglitz used the term "Equivalents" to describe his photographic series of clouds.

image machine

Perhaps the ascendance of the camera pushed painting to explore abstraction.

held time

The joy and sadness of an art like photography that arrests time.

sound and structure

And I'd done a lot of reading. James Huneker on music. And a lot of poetry—Milton, Shelley, Whitman. Robinson Jeffers came along in the '20s or later—he was tremendous. I liked Milton for the same reason I liked Jeffers, the sound and the structure. I don't believe anything that Milton wrote about, but it has a wonderful presence.

—Ansel Adams, from in his last interview, ART NEWS, Volume 83/No 6, interview by Milton Esterow.