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My Father's Leica

19/7/2014

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My father had a Leica his brother had bought from a German POW at the end of the war. He used it for 25 years, shooting roll after roll of patient black and white, before he sold it and used the money to buy an old SLR for himself, and my first camera for me.

He never told me how to make a picture, never criticised my work, and never told me to look at anyone else's. Just encouraged me to see things my own way and then died when I was 17.

When I decided to start shooting professionally, for the first two years I forbade myself to look at any pictures except for the ones coming up in the trays in my darkroom at night.

It was years before I realised where that idea had germinated. I hadn't wanted to be influenced, but that in itself had come from him.

Once I started to look at other work, it was Lee Miller who stood out. Her acute eye, her intimacy, her versatility and her madness. I bought four of her prints which hang on my wall to remind me to always look at things in many different ways. Later I traded a portrait for her 1938 picture of the Great Pyramid, which doesn't show the pyramid, but trumps all other photos of it; and still makes me smile every day. The year after she shot the picture, the second world war began and when it ended my father got his Leica.
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Lee Miller

16/3/2014

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 "Being a great photojournalist is a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you."

"I didn’t waste a minute all my life’ – but I know, now, that if I had it over again I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body, and my affection.”


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Danny Lyon

16/2/2013

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Danny Lyon
"I like the dark room, the radio, the yellow light glowing. I rip the printing paper into quarters. One square is swimming in the Dektol. Through the clear, brown liquid I see my work emerging – my picture. Then I take it, the little piece, and give it to the person pictured in it, a return for what they have given me. Thirty years pass. People die. Children grow old. They keep the little piece, stuck up on a wall with thumbtacks, creased and stained: themselves, young and alive, forever. That is photography."


"I’m a visionary. I don’t have any sense of time. Pictures have no mortality to them. The moment they’re made, they go into the future. I deal with that and I love it."



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Francis Bacon

27/12/2012

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"The contemplation of things as they are is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention."    
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Henri Cartier Bresson

27/12/2012

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One must always take photographs with the greatest respect for the subject and for oneself.



What is there more fugitive and transitory than the expression on a human face? The first impression given by a particular face is often the right one; but the photographer should try always to substantiate the first impression by “living” with the person concerned. The decisive moment and psychology, no less than the camera position, are the principle factors in the making of a good portrait.

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