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Harry Callahan Interview 2 (1971)

I just don’t know what makes a picture, really — the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it’s beautiful and another guy can write it and it’s dead. What that difference is, I don’t know. […]

Robert Frank (1924-2019): A Farewell

If Mr. Frank could not escape our awareness of him as the maker of The Americans, he certainly has refused to rest on that laurel, and doggedly resisted our defining him by it. He’s made any attempt to place him on a pedestal or elevate him to a pantheon as difficult as any major artist I know of, past or present. […]

A. D. Coleman on Photo Books, 1978 (d)

From now on, when people start to talk about or to write about the illustrated book as a phenomenon in book cultures, they’re going to have to start taking into account the photography book as a kind of entity in itself. […]

On the Subject of John Szarkowski (b)

Szarkowski’s patronage practices tread ever closer to cronyism, in effect if not by intent. His esthetic, insufficient to the medium’s current stage of evolution, verges on stagnation. His tenure at MoMA, which has been distinguished in many ways, now runs the risk of ending in increasingly acrimonious confrontation with practitioners of that very medium to which he has committed so much of his life. […]