Photographers From The United States

"In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98th Meridian—where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn't—towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place—now that it is dead—had come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied."

"The city is a place where people feel free to do and be whatever they want."

"I think that there is a huge disparity in Los Angeles, as there is in the US in general, between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, the haves and the have-nots. And so many of the areas in which I photograph are areas where there are the have-nots."

"I was told that if there weren't any power wires, I wouldn't have a body of work. I tend to use them on a regular basis in designing my pictures. They're wonderful for filling the sky."

"If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t have to lug a camera."

"I feel like I am floating in plasma I need a teacher or a lover I need someone to risk being involved with me. I am so vain and I am so masochistic. How can they coexist?"

"Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner…?"

"While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph."

"This action that I foresee has nothing to do with melodrama. It is that life, as lived by me now, is a series of exceptions. I was , or am, not unique - but special. This is why I was an artist. I was inventing a language for people to see the everyday things that I also see, and show them something different. Nothing to do with not being able 'to take it' in the big city, or with self-doubt or because my heart is gone. And not to teach people a lesson. Simply the other side."

"You cannot see me from where I look at myself."

"Real things don't frighten me - just the ones in my mind do."

"Another year of dishonesty"

"There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."

"While it was generally observed by early travelers among the , that they employed plants for medicinal purposes, it was long believed, even by scientific students, that the practice of Indian doctors was purely . The late Dr. , however, declared from the beginning of his ethnological investigations that the Indians employed many plants of real value in medicine."

"The long winter nights were devoted by the to the ceremonies of their secret fraternities, exhorting their most benevolent gods; rain priests in retreat invoked their anthropic deities for rain to fructify the earth, and elders taught the youths, sitting attentively at their knees by the flickering firelight, the mysteries of their life and religion. Of all the secrets of their lives none is more strictly guarded or more carefully transmitted than the knowledge of healing. The "doctor" instructs in the lore of plants, and the relation of plants to man and beast."

"(quote from p. 36)"

"The children are industrious and patient little creatures, the boys assisting their elders in farming and , and the girls performing their share of domestic duties. A marked trait is their loving-kindness and care for younger brothers and sisters. Every little girl has her own water vase as soon as she is old enough to accompany her mother to the river in capacity of assistant water-carrier, and thus they begin at a very early age to poise the vase, Egyptian fashion, on their heads."

"Whilst the old still occupied the , they were attacked by the to avenge the supposed death of a priest who had been sent among them as a missionary many years before. The priest, feeling himself entirely forgotten by his own people, had identified himself with those among whom he had dwell so long. Apprised of the approach of the hostile Spaniards, the Indians prepared to defend themselves with huge stones to be hurled among the enemy should they attempt to scale the mesa by the only practicable pathway up the almost perpendicular face of the cliff. But when the cause of the hostile demonstration became known to the Indians, the priest in the absence of paper on which to write, scraped a smooth and wrote upon it a message to the attacking party. The skin was fastened to a large stone and thrown down into the valley. Upon this information of the safety of the priest, the Spaniards retired, leaving the Indians undisturbed. This tradition is very similar to the account given in ’ ”Conquest of Mexico,” of 's attack upon , and this author states that "beyond doubt ancient Zuñi and Cibola were the same Pueblo.""

"I am glad you ran a thread through these works. Maybe it’s just that things are more interesting where worlds intersect. Whether this is where the water’s edge meets the land or when the circus rolls into a small town. On the edge is where relationships and juxtaposition can be complicated and hopefully more visually interesting."

"I do tell myself when working technically that I’m working on the edge. For some reason, I like to come up with elaborate schemes to produce images. These seem like great ideas in my head, but often in practice don’t work out."

"The three dimensional affected me but I also liked that it was an older process that gave a classic, vintage look to the image. It took me a couple of years to figure it out. I did a lot of research on Orotones and tried to find out how they are made and learned there is no written recipe. With experimentation, I made several Orotones and then took them from there. It has a kind of granular effect, playing with the gold powder, there’s a metallic feel to it. All these things work together to make the image really interesting."

"My equipment tends to be more on the edge, also. Cameras with multiple lenses and shutter, hand held 5×7 and 8×10 cameras, pinhole and fingerprint cameras."

"I had done the airshow as straight black and white to print. I probably shot the show ten years in a row. I was trying to move beyond the straight prints and I was thinking more about the real sculptural affect that the contrails make as the airplanes were flying. I was trying to make a more three-dimension effect for the images. I started shooting it with a 5 x 7 camera, knowing that I wanted to do some contact prints, originally thinking that they might be platinum, or something like that. I was at an antique image show in Chicago and ran by an Orotone print that someone was selling. Not knowing if I had ever seen one before, I was pretty blown away by it. I asked the seller, What is this? and he said, An Orotone print. And I asked him, How do you make these? And he looked at me and he said, How would I know?"

"... my mother got a phone call from Dora one day. And it was in 1948. And she said to my mother, "Have you decided who you are going to vote for in the for ?" And my mother said, "No, I haven't." "Well," she said, "I'll be up to talk to you about it." And my mother was one vote. And she drove from all the way to for one vote."

", 16,140 ft., and latitude 61º 44', is within 60 ft. of the highest of the . The completion of the , 196 miles long, from to the famous of the , in April, 1911, brought Mt. Blackburn tow within 35 miles of civilization. I had gone to Alaska merely to see the wonderful scenery, of the southwest coast, by boat and train, and because I wished to see the only remaining pioneer region of America. Knowing that I should find no Swiss guides in Alaska, I had no idea of doing any serious mountain climbing. Indeed, it was late in July that I first read of Mt. Blackburn, by chance, in a prospector's cabin, in the wilds of the Kenai Peninsula, where I was hunting for a big brown bear. There, in a Report of the United States Geological Survey, Mt. Blackburn was mentioned as never having been ascended, and as "worthy of the hardiest mountaineer.""

"I climb for pleasure, for the wonderful views and the vigorous exertion, for the relaxation of a complete change for mind and body, and because of the inspiration to the spirit. To combine exploration with must, no doubt, so increase the interest as to well repay the augmented difficulties. All I would emphasize is that to climb anywhere repays the effort, even if it must be within reach of civilization and where others have gone before. To me there is ample reward in the uplift of the spirit; in the moral discipline, the keen interest, and the training to think, of a hard battle carefully planned, in the satisfaction of a love of adventure, and in the invigorating physical exercise."

"Keen's experience on inextricably linked her with the . In 1914 she returned to explore the in , hiring the plucky Handy, a local sourdough, and a topographer from Boston. The later named a section of the near the Harvard Glacier the Dora Keen Range. Keen wrote and gave lectures about her expeditions. She wanted to reach out in particular to other women."

"On May 19, 1912, after 27 days of climbing, Dora (one month shy of her 41st birthday) became the first person to reach the top of Mount Blackburn. When she got home, people flocked to her lectures and photo presentations about her climb. She used her platform to advocate for women’s rights and philanthropic causes. ... END NOTE: In the 1960’s, determined that the highest summit of Mount Blackburn wasn’t actually the eastern side that Dora (and George) climbed but the Western peak which is taller by 200 feet. However, the eastern route is much longer and harder, so many guides today still give her credit for this first ascent."

"April, 1912, found her back again at , where she met George W. Handy, in whom she had confidence, and invited him to join the party. With six other men and dog sledges they started up on the 22nd. This time she was determined and would not be stopped if it were humanly possible to succeed. Thirty-three days altogether were spent on the snow and ice, 22 without tents and 10 almost without food. Caves dug in the snow provided shelter up to 12,000 feet. From there, in weather clearing after a succession of severe storms, she and Handy reached the summit on May 19, 8:30 a.m. It had taken four weeks. The view was perfect in every direction for up to 200 miles. The return took three days to Base Camp and two more to ."

"the moment there is a power cut"

"the hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators"

"Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.”"

"Church has become one of the biggest businesses in Nigeria… these Christians are militants, preaching a potent combination of a fear of hellfire and a love of financial prosperity…"

"Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, rises out of the Sahel like a modernist apparition. The avenues are clean and broad and the government buildings are imposing, with that soulless, vaguely fascistic air common to all capitals cities of the world…"

"I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy—certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process—and in that sense I have returned a stranger.”"

"Help us fight corruption. If any employee of the consulate asks for a bribe or tip, please, have a discreet word with the Consul General"

"I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes."

"They gave no reason. They just said I would have to submit another one in twelve months. I was crushed. I left school. Plagiarism? The only possibilities are either that they refused to believe my command of English and theory or, I think this is even more likely, that they were punishing me for world events in which I had played no role. My thesis committee had me on September 20, 2001..That was the year I lost my illusions about Europe."

"Did the Palestinians build the concentration camps? He said. What about the the Armenians: do their deaths mean less because they are not Jews."

"Policemen routinely stop drivers of commercial vehicles at this spot to demand bribe"

"the next Edward Said! I was going to do it by studying comparative literature and using it as a basis for societal critique."

"Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met."

"And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster."

"Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?"

"I have mentally rehearsed a reaction for a possible encounter with such corruption at the airport in Lagos. But to walk in off a New York street and face a brazen demand for a bribe: that is a shock I am ill-prepared for.”"

"Hey, hey young guy, why trouble yourself? They'll take your money anyway, and they'll punish you by delaying your passport. Is that what you want? Aren't you more interested in getting your passport than trying to prove a point?"

"I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy."

"And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city."

"Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.”"

"I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.”"