“Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” writes David Hume. “It
exists merely in the mind which contemplates them, and each mind
perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity
where another is sensible of beauty, and every individual ought to
acquiesce in his own sentiment without pretending to regulate those of
others.”

Just read a review of a new biography about the author David Foster Wallace in which the biographer, D.T. Max, chronicles Wallace's evolution as a writer.  I found this observation of special interest, and suggest that it's sentiment goes to the heart of any creative endeavor:

Wallace’s interest in… wordplay, mimicry and metaphysics yielded to a more earnest desire to communicate and connect, how a delight in cleverness and irony gave way to a call for writers who might treat “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.”

I can't recall where I read this description of the photographs of Parisian photographer Eugene Atget, but I found it compelling and, like all photographers, hope the images I create might embody some of this poetic notion:

pictures that he made … are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious, and true.

Some time ago I watched Bill Moyers interview the writer Barry Lopez and found his replies to Moyers' questions so intriguing that I downloaded a transcript.

When Moyers asks him what it means to be a storyteller, Lopez recalls a conversation he had with a fellow novelist, a man named Kazumasa Hirai who told him:

"Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language." And he said in Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that.

That metaphor – the word as a vessel – is true as well for the image.

“creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

                                Albert Einstein

I came across this provocative quote of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry this morning:

One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

Came across a wonderful interview with legendary designer Milton Glaser in a new magazine, Generation Monthly, in which the interviewer asks Glaser his views on art:

"To summarize, what I have ended up with as a definition now is that first off, art is a successful mechanism that our species has come up with – and a device we use – to determine what is real."

From a thoughtful, provocative, must-read op-ed piece in the NY TIMES this week, here is an excerpt from Tim Kreider's "The Busy Trap."

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

Came across this wonderfully simple but telling observation by legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser:

“I move things around until they look right.”

The corollary for a photographer is equally simple: moving the camera around until things look right…