We Cannot Empty The Mind

In A Foreign Country It Is Far From Easy To Study A Scene At Length When You Know That At Any Minute Someone May Appear And Ask What You Are Doing And That You Can't Answer, And You Haven't Many References, And You Don't Know The Law. Neither Is It Easy To Find And Know The Subjects For Portraits Or Comfortable To Make Such Picture When You Cannot Apply An Anesthesia Of Small Talk.

Whatever Power There Is In The Urban Pictures Is Bound To The Closeness With Which They Skirt Banality. For A Shot To Be Good — Suggestive Of More Than Just What It Is — It Has To Come Perilously Near Being Bad, Just A View Of Stuff.

Still Photographs Often Differ From Life More By Their Silence Than By The Immobility Of Their Subjects. Landscape Pictures Tend To Converge With Life, However, On Summer Nights, When The Sounds Outside, After We Call In Children And Close Garage Doors, Are Small - The Whir Of Moths, The Snap Of A Stick.

My First Show At Moma In New York Was Pictures Of New Developments Along The Eastern Edge Of The Rocky Mountains. They Were Housing Developments That Were Brutal In Many Ways, That Cared Almost Not A Thing For The Human Beings Inside. They Were Just Designed To Make Money.

Invention In Photography Is So Laborious As To Be In Most Instances Perverse.