It Could be Said. . . .

I don't want to talk about the things that are on my mind.  And I won't.  But I haven't anything else to say, so I will simply post a series of quotes from last night's reading.  Sally Mann.  "Hold Still."

It’s an odd endeavor, and the remarkable thing is that my models are willing to let me try.

There are nimble justifications for making potentially injurious imagery, some grounded in expediency and others cloaked with the familiar Faulknerian conceit: “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies."

An asshole who makes great art is an asshole who makes great art; but an asshole who makes lousy art is just an asshole.

[T]he fact remains that many, I daresay even most, good pictures of people come to one degree or another at the expense of the subject.

Photography is always invasive, but these experiences are consensual and, in the best hours, transcendent.

I have had men, complete strangers, trust me enough to offer up physical characteristics about which they were sensitive—missing digits, scabby, eczema-ridden backs, surgical scars—with no prompting and no embarrassment in the quiet afternoon light of my studio deck. We don’t speak much, but we both give, and take, something. At the most basic level, making these images is exploitive, reductive, and fraught. But at a higher level, which portraiture at its best can achieve, the results can also be transformative expressions of love, affirmation, and hope. If transgression is at the very heart...