View of the Parthenon/Edward Dodwell 1821 |
"Every educated person drew as a matter of course.... Drawing was an ordinary form of speech used as a pastime of aide memoire, without pretensions to 'high' art. Nevertheless, this general graphic literacy was the compost from which the great depictive artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were able to grow: Degas, Eakins, Picasso, Matisse. It was gradually abolished by the mass camera market." Robert Hughes
Drawing as a form of speech....
How deeply can you see with a camera?
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.” Susan Sontag On Photography