Balazs Pataki

Once I was standing in a subway station looking at a set of ancient photographs and there was one, taken a hundred years ago, showing a girl stepping into the pool of a long-forgotten spa. I looked at her limbs, barely shown under the bathing suit that was surely trendy in 1900 and felt the heat growing inside as I studied her face, bound by a spell that left only one question: what is this magic, how can I feel attracted to a woman whose bones must have turned to dust long ago? How could anything made her so eternal, so lively, that I could want her beauty even after a hundred years?
That was the moment when the magic of photography put a spell on me.

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"There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art."

Alfred Stieglitz, American Amateur Photographer, 1893

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Found this gem while looking for some info on Wen P's behalf:

"'And what do I call straight photography,' (one might) say, 'can you define it?' Well, that's easy enough. Rely on your camera, on your eye, on your good taste and your knowledge of composition, consider every fluctuation of color, light and shade, study lines and values and space division, patiently wait until the scene or object of your pictured vision reveals itself in its supremest moment of beauty, in short, compose the picture which you intend to take so well that the negative will be absolutely perfect and in need of no... manipulation." Sadakihi Hartmann

Private comment: to get to this level of creative alertness one probably has to spend a life in a zen-buddhist monastery... Actually I think the only pics coming even close to this are enso-circles. So, a toast to unsharpness.

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