Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood (womanhood) of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its…
How to get started this morning. Last night’s sleep was troubled. Dreams, all unpleasant, but those have come infrequently lately. I realize that each of us has a young vulnerable child within. What child does not have a nightmare from time to time? It’s a big world and there are monsters about! But morning…
It is a Sunday morning. A glorious day, sunlight, all vegetation shimmers after the inch or so of rain that fell yesterday. A squirrel aspires to “carve” a habitation from an old log in the middle of our woodpile, — to give birth to it’s babies. Yesterday the squirrel peered at me from the…
Photographs are, of course, artifacts… Thus they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies – an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after…
Of all the nationsthe United States with veins full of poetical stuffmost need poets —and will doubtless have the greatestand use them the greatest. Of all mankind the great poet is the equitable man.Not in him but off from him things aregrotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.Nothing out of its place is…
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is the machine. “Speed is at the bottom of it all,” as Hart Crane said (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), “the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is…
Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, or a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patiently crafted, the more naïve – the more authoritative the photograph is likely to be….
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity… nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse and to pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are…
All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If greatness are in conjunction in a man or a woman It is enough… The fact will prevail through the universe… But the gaggery of gilt of a million years Will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This…
As Walt Whitmangazed down the democratic vistas of culture,he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness,importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbishto make any discrimination of value, except the most generous one. All facts, even the mean ones are incandescent in Whitman’s America.p. 27 Much of modern artis…
