Gallery
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self . . ."
- Cyril Connolly / The New Statesman / 1933
“I began to publish enough, and not too slowly, to justify my hopes for success, and as I continued, I made a most perplexing discovery; namely, that for all his conscious concern with technique, a writer did not so much create the novel as he was created by the novel . . . And perhaps the writer’s greatest freedom, as artist, lies precisely in his possession of technique: for it is through technique that he comes to possess and express the meaning of his life . . .”
- Ralph Ellison / Hidden Name and Complex Fate / Library of Congress / 1964
"He thought of photography as a way of preserving segments out of time itself, without regard for the conventional structures of picture building. Nothing was to be imposed on experience; the truth was to be discovered, not constructed . . .
As Evans remembers his thought of the time, he wanted his work to be 'literate, authoritative, transcendent.' The photographer must define his subject with an educated awareness of what it is and what it means; he must describe it with such simplicity and sureness that the result seems an unchallengeable fact, not merely the record of a photographer's opinion; yet the picture itself should possess a taut athletic grace, an inherent structure, that gives it a life in metaphor . . .
- John Szarkowski / introduction to "Walker Evans" / Museum of Modern Art / 1971
