Photographers From The United States

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone."

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

"There’s strong leftist support for Palestinian causes in the United States. Many of my friends in New York, for example, think that Israel is doing terrible things in the Occupied Territories."

"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it—but all that had gone before."

"Randall's writing fuses her commitment to revolutionary change with her remarkable poetic sensibility."

"Margaret Randall has suggested that the socialist movements in Latin America and the Caribbean were impeded by "the failure to develop an indigenous feminist discourse and vital feminist agenda"...Randall puts it categorically: "If a revolution is unable or unwilling to address the needs of all people, it is doomed to failure.""

"the status quo still fears what she and writers like her have to offer: a clear, strong, articulate commitment to socialist and feminist values, with a call to action for the establishment of those values as a way of life. She is dangerous to the interests of the tiny elite who run this country-and for that we should be thankful."

""personal wholeness and political health... must be rewoven into a single fabric. They cannot be separated," writes Randall."

"...one of America's rebellious daughters. She makes a powerful witness."

"I was completely captivated by seeing a new revolution. I had read Marx and Lenin but I was heavily impressed by the human aspect of seeing people with dignity."

"One of the things that has happened to me out of experience and out of revolutionary practice is coming to the conclusion that people are human beings.People are good and bad everywhere. Five years ago I was a much more schematic person. In that sense I've changed a lot."

"I had to learn to fit my desire to be successful, well known, famous, and my desire to get my message across, how to fit this into service of the revolution without that meaning that I was just writing pamphlets...It was a struggle to maintain my integrity. And it was a very intense experience. What does it mean to write for The People?...I feel one must take sides in a struggle. What is that terrible phrase in the bourgeois language, 'I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' Well, I hate that. One has values in life and they are what they are."

"We must reclaim our voices in order to create the women (indeed, the people) we must be: no more conditioned dichotomy between emotions, mind, and body; no further need for the fragmented or reactive response."

"More than a decade ago, in the introduction to another book, I said that socialism and feminism need one another. Now I would add that we must work hard, individually and collectively, to reunite body and mind-and learn about the ways in which they work together-for the health of our planet, our society, ourselves. Through these years which have proven so difficult and discouraging for the socialist dream I continue to nurture, this seems more than ever important."

"I deeply believe in the importance of language, that we must retrieve ways to say what we mean, assign responsibility, give the perpetrators as well as the victims and survivors first and last names. We must teach ourselves how to use language powerfully; only then will its reclaimed and highly charged memory enable us to create ourselves into the world of equality and justice we so urgently need. I'm not talking about vision without work. Bumper stickers like "VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE" annoy me. It's not enough to see with the eye-even the mind's eye."

"It is very important not to be overly romantic about revolution...There is a tendency in capitalistic countries to think of revolution as a schematic thing, forgetting that revolutions are made by people and that there are a lot of contradictions. Well, there are a lot of problems here, underdevelopment, housing, education. The exciting thing is to see them make mistakes and try again. I love it so much more for being able to criticize it and see it for what it is. I love it so much I don't want people to be romantic about it."

"revolutionary–as I understand that word. That is to say, more inclusive, more outspoken, more creative, more of a reflection of what we all hope the new man and new woman will be."

"I experienced Cuban society as exhilarating, exciting, and amazing. I loved being part of a project that was making itself from the inside out. I felt privileged to be living in a place where real equality seemed to be the collective goal. I thrilled to meetings in which drafts of new law were discussed, and my neighbors or colleagues and I could have input into those laws. I also felt privileged, especially as a mother, to live in a society that saw health and education as basic human rights, and that was developing an outstanding system of universal health care that freed me from worry when my children were ill."

"The McCarran-Walter clause under which I was charged was popularly referred to as “the ideological exclusion” clause. My deportation order stated that my work was found to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States.”"

"revolutionary processes, like all civic experiments, are made by human beings, some notably more interested than others in true equality. So, I also learned how easy it is for problems to arise and for revolutionary ideas to be sidelined."

"I discovered feminism in Mexico, at the end of my time there, when the first articles from US and European feminists began to appear...Feminism wasn’t academic theory to me, but something to be lived. I needed it."

"Walking to the edge is what I've done most of my life. Walking to the edge: taking conscious risk. Calling up, even in the most difficult of circumstances, this courage of vulnerability. Honoring process, a profoundly female business. So engaged, I have often felt painfully alone. Then, in instant recognition and warmed by its consequent explosion of tenderness and life, there is the presence of that millennia of sisters. Sisters, as well, in the here and now. And yes, also brothers. If I have learned little else, I have learned that I have no choice but to walk again and again to the edge. Because there is no choice, and because there are so many of us walking out here, I am not alone. There is challenge and also a steadiness in our discovery."

"my mothering was circumscribed in two ways: as a revolutionary involved in trying to make the world a better place for all children, and as a feminist who demanded from my partner equal involvement in household tasks, and wanted to imbue my children with those values as well–my son as well as my daughters."

"What I want out of life, is to contribute as much as possible to make a better world."

"Activism and feminism both draw on the imagination, requiring taking risks and thinking outside the box. This is the very definition of poetry."

"all in all, I think we revolutionaries of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s gave our children love and a sterling set of values."

"Margaret Randall is one of our finest, most thoughtful and articulate, and impassioned and compassionate writers. She is fearless, and a great voice for reason and hope despite seemingly desperate times."

"I believe that the Cuban Revolution was one of the great political events of the 20th century, and the fact that it exists today in the face of so many obstacles and problems is extraordinary."

"I am against censorship wherever and however it raises its head, and I am always disappointed when I see a government concerned with justice exercise censorship in any form."

"In writing about Margarita and Julia, I received a sign in the fall of 1986 that these poems were complete and ready to emerge. I met two women poets who have these names and who have had an impact in my life: Margaret Randall and Julia Alvarez."

"I believe that my years of doing oral history have helped me pay attention to people’s voices, and this consciousness often shows itself in my poetry."

"The two revolutionary societies I’ve lived in are Cuba, during the second decade of its revolution, and Nicaragua during the first four years of Sandinism. In both places, I learned an enormous amount, mostly about what it means to attempt to construct a truly egalitarian life for people. Access to universal healthcare, decent housing, free education, a fair justice system, and experiments aimed at improving life for all members of society was important as I raised four children and watched them go through school and become self-sufficient adults. In Cuba, there were shortages, and food and clothing rationing was pretty severe in the years we were there. But I can’t remember ever feeling this was a problem. Rather, it felt good to know that what was needed was spread among everyone."

"The myth makes it bigger but when you go in there, you know where you are. I've been in many places bigger than that and it ain't the same."

"Eggleston was a man of his time, the 1960s. In the 1960s, street photography was at its zenith, and Pop Art dominated painting and sculpture. Eggleston fused elements of both street photography and Pop Art into his oeuvre. Like Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Stephen Shore, Eggleston shot from the hip, blending the new apolitical snapshot aesthetic with the older and more traditional stylings of Cartier-Bresson."

"William Eggleston, the pioneer of colour photography shocked the art world in 1976 with his exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and his accompanying book, William Eggleston's Guide. The exhibition validated colour photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Alongside his friends and Gary Winogrand, Eggleston is regarded as one of the most inventive and radical photographers of modern times. His reputation continued to grow with the publication of The Democratic Forest in 1989, an epic drawn from, over ten thousand prints, with, an introduction by Eudora Welty. It was described by The New York Times as the first masterpiece of colour photography. Eggleston has always lived in Mississippi and Memphis. His work is deeply rooted in the South, but he transcends the label of Southern artist. His range is international. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition originating at Barbican Art Gallery in London, is the first time work from his whole career has been gathered to form a coherent sequence. It follows a course of ancient and modern from Mississippi to Louisiana and into Elvis Presley's mansion Graceland, through the oil rigs in Tennessee and the orchards of the Transvaal, to the slopes of Mount Kenya and down the Nile, with the collection ending on the lyrical imagery of the English rose. The cumulative effect of Eggleston's startling work reinforces his reputation as a major American artist, whose significance extends beyond the world of photography."

"You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too... I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something."

"Guinevere van Seenus, who I have photographed for more than 20 years, was one of the most important muses. Delicate but decisive, masculine but feminine, a hymn to creativity, imagination and dreams. (Paolo Roversi)"

"What I write here is a description of what I have come to understand about photography, from photographing and from looking at photographs. A work of art is that thing whose form and content are organic to the tools and materials that made it. Still photography is a chemical, mechanical process. Literal description or the illusion of literal description, is what the tools and materials of still photography do better than any other graphic medium. A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. Understanding this, one can postulate the following theorem: Anything and all things are photographable. A photograph can only look like how the camera saw what was photographed. Or, how the camera saw the piece of time and space is responsible for how the photograph looks. Therefore, a photograph can look any way. Or, there's no way a photograph has to look (beyond being an illusion of a literal description). Or, there are no external or abstract or preconceived rules of design that can apply to still photographs. I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both."

"I hate the term. I think it’s a stupid term, “street photography.” I don’t think it tells you anything about a photographer or work. I have a book out called The Animals, so call me a zoo photographer? Doesn’t make any sense to me."

"I photograph to see what things look like photographed."

"For me, the landscape has always been the constant in my work. I work with scale as a way to give context to human endeavors, military endeavors, and the history of power. In the end, Vietnam has endured many battles and gone through so many changes. The Chinese invasion, the Japanese occupation, the colonialism of the French, the Indochina War, the Americans—the constancy was always the landscape. And people change, cultures change over time, but there is something about the land. Even as our world modernizes, there is a certain consistency, a certain authenticity."

"Rather than whether or not there is a future for combat photography, I think one of the big differences now is the role of the civilian—the amateur photographer. Conflicts will always be newsworthy, someone will always need to be there to document. Now the technology is such that anyone can be there and take a quick picture, post it, and send it out to the world. In these pictures you don’t look at the artistry anymore—if there is such a thing—it is just information."

"I think at sea, it is always about some greater force. The forces of the weather, the sky, the wind, all these uncontrollable things, you really feel the greater force of nature. But at the same time, you are on this massive aircraft carrier that costs about one million dollars a day to run! You really see that tension between the natural world and the force of technology. I think for me, the sublime is always a tension of something that you can’t quite control. It creates these emotions in you that are rare, and that make you aware."

"I always take it one step at a time. I see each new project as a response to a certain dissatisfaction, to unanswered questions from the previous work. As we experience life, we change overtime and develop different concerns. Teaching, becoming a parent, losing a parent are some of the important markers that have influenced my work."

"The topic of the military raises questions in ways that other topics would not. There are photographers who have dealt with extreme poverty, or who have photographed horrific labor conditions, and they are not held accountable in the same way. They aren’t asked: what do you think of poverty? But the question of the military is so complicated that it riles up people’s opinions."