What we have is both an example of the interplay between photographs and text, and a fascinating insight into the mind of the British Raj. The photographs are, for the most part, conventional studio-type portraits of individuals, though there are some fine group studies. It is the texts that are the most revealing: a mixture of gossip, ethnography and military intelligence report, with little attempt at distance or objectivity.
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger – The Photobook: A History volume I
A group of natives had gathered around the spot where we had set up the camera. I photographed about 30 different people, and one of them was a drifter called Quinn. He took off his black baseball cap and for a split second his grey hair stood up high, and that was it. Then all hell broke loose. A drunken guy (not a Native) came and yelled at me: If you don’t stop photographing I shoot you in the head. One of the bystanders shouted back: Don’t speak about it, do it. Chris and I took off as quick as we could and that’s what Quinn did too, he disappeared into thin air. In the confusion of the situation we never got his name and address.
From the introduction to Silent Warriors by Eric Klemm
Curtis was fascinated by the idea of the North American Indian, was in fact obsessed with it. And he was determined to capture that idea, that image, before it vanished. This was a common concern among many intellectuals and artists and social scientists at the turn of the nineteenth century, who believed that, while Europeans in the New World were poised on the brink of a new adventure, the Indian was poised on the brink of extinction.
In literature in the United States, this span of time is known as the American Romantic Period, and the Indian was tailor made for it. With its emphasis on feeling, its interest in nature, its fascination with exoticism, mysticism and eroticism, and its preoccupation with the glorification of the past, American Romanticism found in the Indian a symbol in which all these concerns could be united. Prior to the nineteenth century, the prevalent image of the Indian has been that of an inferior being. The romantics imagined their Indian as dying. But in that dying, in that passing away, in that disappearing from the stage of human progress, there was also a sense of nobility.
I probably sound a little cranky – I don’t mean to. I know Curtis paid Indians to shave away any facial hair. I know he talked them into wearing wigs. I know that he would provide one tribe of Indians with clothing from another tribe because the clothing looked more “Indian.”
So his photographs would look authentic.
And while there is a part of me that would have preferred that Curtis had photographed his Indians as he found them, the men with crewcuts and moustaches, the women in cotton print dresses, I am grateful that we have his images at all. For the faces of the mothers and fathers, and aunts and uncles, the sisters and brothers who look at you from the depths of these photographs are not romantic allusions, they are real people.
Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Massey Lecture Series 2003.
… photography has become a household word and a household want; is used alike by art and science, by love, business, and justice; is found in the most sumptuous saloon, and in the dingiest attic—in the solitude of the Highland cottage, and in the glare of the London gin-palace—in the pocket of the detective, in the cell of the convict, in the folio of the painter and architect, among the papers and patterns of the millowner and manufacturer, and on the cold brave breast on the battle-field.
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, from her 1857 essay on photography.
I think about photographers that have had a very discernable look – you know I think about Avedon a lot and the idea of him making those portraits, for example, In the American West. The rebate was a big part of those images and it really allowed those images to have a really graphic nature to them that … ultimately that showing that film edge told you that that was all there was … and, on the planet, that was the thing I chose to show you that day.
Dan Winters interviewed by Ibarionex Perello for the Candid Frame podcast #85.
"We come and we leave. We take our pictures and go. I feel we're deserting him. I wish I'd never stopped photographing the people we met. I wish I could have stayed with the project my whole life."
Richard Avedon after a 2003 reunion meeting with Richard Wheatcroft, a subject Avedon first photographed in 1983 for In the American West.
And at the same time, when something happens, you have to be extremely swift. Like an animal and a prey — vroom! You grasp it and people don’t notice that you have taken it. Very often in a different situation, you can take one picture. You cannot take two. Take a picture and look like a fool, look like a tourist. But if you take two, three pictures, you got trouble. It’s good training to know how far you can go. When the fruit is ripe, you have to pluck it. Quick! With no indulgence over yourself, but daring. I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There’s an elegance, just like in a bullfight.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Living and Looking
from a recently discovered 1971 interview by Sheila Turner-Seed
Photography is a marvelous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that has excited the most astute minds—and one that can be practiced by any imbecile … Photographic theory can be taught in an hour, the basic technique in a day. But what cannot be taught is a feeling for light … It is how light lies on the face that you as artist must capture. Nor can one be taught how to grasp the personality of the sitter. To produce an intimate likeness rather than a banal portrait, the result of mere chance, you must put yourself at once in communication with the sitter, size up his thoughts and his very character.
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon)
Quoted in the biography Nadar by Jean Prinet and Antoinette Dilasser
On the early trips, he adapted existing spaces like a garage or a barn to his needs, and noted the crucial role of a neutral environment to encourage the respectful exchange he was interested in. Eventually this led him to construct a tent studio that could be dismantled and taken from location to location. Penn felt "in this limbo [of the tent] there was for us both the possibility of contact that was a revelation to me and often, I could tell, a moving experience for the subjects themselves, who without words—by only their stance and their concentration—were able to say much that spanned the gulf between our different worlds."
Biography. From the website of The Irving Penn Foundation
It really does allow my work to stay in … I would say, semi-anonymity. When I started, it was because graffiti is illegal – you get arrested. And then suddenly when I started pasting other people’s portraits on the street it was as if I was writting their name – so why would I put my name up? And then I guess I realized it became easier to stay in the shadow of the work.
JR interview with Kristie Lu Stout.
Following the blurring of his first photographs Brodovitch might have turned to any vaiety of flash techniques, including Dr. Harold Edgerton’s recently introduced electronic flash, as did Barbara Morgan and Gjon Mili in their own dance photographs at this same time. But Brodovitch has no interest in arresting motion; he knew that the animal vitality and the suggestive power of the dancers’ movements were at the very heart of ballet’s unique stage atmosphere. In a leap of imagination, he suddenly saw the “mistakes” of his first photographs not as irredeemable defects, but as intriguing new possibilities. instead of eliminating them, he determined to push them even further.
Christopher Phillips
“Brodovitch on Ballet” American Photographer (December 1981).
By the 1950s, Jones and his wife were still living in Lincolnshire with no electricity or running water. He was a Victorian outcast who could not reconcile himself to the realities of living in the modern age. His children were shocked to find that for many years he did not claim his rightful old age pension. Always a proud man, he considered it charity. He died at age 92 on November 15, 1959. These would be the salient events of a seemingly solid, unassuming, yet useful life except for a discovery made twenty-two years later.
Robert Flynn Johnson
Introduction to Plant Kingdoms: The Photographs of Charles Jones
You are never welcome. You have to spend time. You have to be patient. I’m never in a hurry. I have to connect with 100 people to convince one. I live with people. I try to transmit why I am so fascinated with them. And finally they say, ‘Pierre, let’s try.’
Pierre Gonnord
interview with Andrew Alexander in Arts Atl.
The Portrait is finished when I am able to leave my model to himself, to his thoughts, to his own mind, as if he were at home without any witness.
Patrick Faigenbaum
Text panel at the Vancouver Art Gallery Exhibition, 2013
In the 19th century, the portrait resembled a small, private stage play. The subject of the portrait got ready, dressed appropriately, and set off the photographer’s. Once there, he entered the studio — which, with its plethora of props and necessary items such as chairs, armchairs, drapes, pictures and statuettes was reminiscent of a small stage — and was fitted into this grid of accessories. The background and furnishings were chosen, the pose and attitude rehearsed — “Wouldn’t you like to be holding a book in your hands?” — and finally the lighting was set up.
Urs Stahel
Afterwards: “After the climax” as a focal element in Rineke Dijkstra’a portrait photography