A Quote Out of Context

© Jacques Henri Lartigue
While reading Langton's book, Photojournalism and Today's News, he had a quote from John Szarkovski's The Photographer's Eye: "To quote out of context is the essense of the photographer's craft." And given everything that I've been reading lately, I said to myself, "Whoa. What is he thinking?" I don't like the idea that the pictures that I create aren't telling the true story of what I am seeing. Otherwise, what's the point?

So, I'm thinking that he's crazy. But I want to know where his 'authority' is coming from, so I did a little research...

Here's his obit from the Washington Post. It includes this really cool quote from an interview he gave in 2000: "The truth is that anybody can make a photograph. The trouble is not that photographs are hard to make. The trouble is that they are hard to make intelligent and interesting."

Other obits:
Obit Magazine
New York Times

And reading what people said about him, like that "almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art," it gives me pause and wants me to know more. I guess I need to do some more research...

But I still don't like the idea that photography is quotes out of context, because to me, that says that you're twisting things or misunderstanding, and I want me and my message(s) be understood.

The Passing of a Great Man

While studying, I discovered that one of my favorite artists, Andrew Wyeth, had passed away a few weeks ago. He was 91.

“PENNSYLVANIA—Painter Andrew Wyeth, 1991.” ©David Alan Harvey/Magnum.
He was most famous for his Helga paintings, and for Christina's World, but I loved him because of his other works. I was lucky enough to get to see an exhibition of his work at the Nelson-Atkins Museum. And in person, they were breathtaking. Some of them were practically 3-dimensional and others looked like photographs, with the amount of realism in them. What I really loved about them is how they celebrated the New England landscape and how they weren't about people, even when people were in them. It was as if the people were part of their surroundings, that those surroundings were what were being reveled in. And he wasn't afraid about the stillness that comes with being alone:

"I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future ~ the timelessness of the rocks and the hills ~ all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape ~ the loneliness of it ~ the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show. I think anything like that ~ which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone ~ people always feel is sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?"

Here's a few of my favorites: