War only in the ring. Peace on earth
Dare to be irrational! - keep free from formulas, open to any fresh impulse, fluid.
Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn't photogenic.
If I have any 'message' worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.
I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. Here was every sensuous curve of the human figure divine but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.
The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.
Now, to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk.
Music is a great energizer. It's a language everybody knows.
Culture, which by definition serves no purpose, has now found a role as the consort of business. Right off the bat we have a beached whale, since there is nothing that disdains culture as much as business does. . . . In fact, 'corporate culture' is nothing more than the crystallization of the stupidity of a group of people at a given moment.
Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
If I'm signing autographs and I see one hundred people in a line I've got to remind myself, "That person is one one-hundredth of my day, but to them I'm their day. " You know what I mean? Unless they meet J. Lo later on.