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Now for the special feature presentation of the American Art Festival the symposium on photography we take you to the Museum of Modern Art. As another feature of the first annual American Art Festival your city station now presents from the auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art a panel discussion on the topic what is modern photography. Moderator for the symposium will be Edward striken director of the department of talk of the the Museum of Modern Art dissipating in the discussion will be the following top ranking American photographers MARGARET WHITE Walker Evans John maybe he's at modelling right Maurice Homer page having pen then Shon Chiles Sheeler and Aaron Siskind And now to begin our discussion here is our moderator Edward Steichen. But evening ladies and gentlemen. Fellow photographers. I would first like the patch on the salute. To W N Y C. In case there are any out of towners in this audience. I want to tell them that there be any way I see. There's a municipal broadcasting station owned by the city of New York and we're very proud. Proud of the fine music they give us and every day and big and I want to give a particular salute to its magnificent engineering staff. For the quality of the music they give us but I have family. Now the next plug will be for the museum. The Museum of Modern Art as you know or should know is the only museum in the world. That as an honest to goodness department of photography. Department that isn't exactly the same footing. As. The other departments in the museum. A great many museums render something like lip service to photography. But here we are encouraged to go out and we have the backing of the all of the directors of the departments and the trustees when we first open here that Bob and you know my own direction sent out a press which went something like this but talk of me as a board a potent factor in increasing our knowledge in shaping our concept and understanding of can every life I believe it's come through its influence cannot be overstressed and then in particular I stress the importance of photography as an art as a vital modern means of giving form to ideas it is the artist in photography who beyond his own creativity and establish a standard which produces new influences and new uses of the medium. Our first large exhibition was called in and out of focus with following paragraph as a preamble any rational opinion or evaluation of the scope and significance of today's photography must be based on an informed approach exploring the various tendencies directions and phases in contemporary photography. All of the exhibitions that we've had to date have been more or less along those lines and this symposium tonight is in the census. Carrying on that same idea. Ordinarily without the first like little children to be seen not heard tonight we're going to hear from them they're going to have to explain their misdemeanor. Well we don't pretend that this is a complete picture of photography. For us to take to feel the magazine photographer but we were to give that really adequate coverage we have to mobilize the entire society of magazine photographers and bring them out here which would be a special problem of its own. Those seeking pat answers that they can put in a little hands and take home with the Web talk of is all about are going to be disappointed but I think those of us who are attracted to the medium because it's sturdy and young and have elbow room lots of elbow room we're going to get we're going to be satisfied with what's going. We're going to present the speakers alphabetically. And I'm. I want to start off with a bang. In the first issue of LIFE magazine Margaret Bourke White opened up a new chapter in photojournalism in that issue she said to swift our pace for herself began establishing a series of presidents as it made her an outstanding ace among ace somehow or another she managed to turn up for a camera with her camera in any corner of the globe that is in the midst of some catechism or dynamic shake up she went Galadriel to get Alec gallows bending over enemy territory and their car bombers and was torpedoed at sea much cold rain dirt and stench are things she has taken in her stride to record men places in the vents for her magazine where she points your camera at misery or magnificence is always done with a passionate interest and deep conviction. And. I think I never felt that responsibility more keenly than on my most recent assignment which was to South Africa I knew it was a great opportunity because I knew there was a very important story to be told. As we all have heard this is a country where the situation of discrimination between black and white is most acute It's a country with about ten or eleven million population in which the two million who have white skin and managed to keep eight million people who are unlucky enough to have black skin means in a state where they have no vote where they have very little choice of where they're not given much chance to get an education when they're barred from skilled trades and where now it is very difficult for them if it can be called and I thought Oh well how to show all that how to make up my mind about it of course it was natural to begin in the gold mines because there is centered on getting gold out of the ground and that meant really beginning at the bottom because under Johannesburg the mines go down to the awesome depth of two miles the pictures of this nine year that we showed tonight were taken at a depth of sixty three hundred feet which meant not only more than a mile underground but it meant a thousand feet below sea level. But I found that gold in Johannesburg didn't look so very different from. In Pennsylvania except that the miners were fewer clothes and tucked her but I think the photographer was pretty hot too at a thousand feet below sea level but I decided that it took something more it seemed to me that it wasn't only the work these people did that was important but the lives that they lived when they weren't looking and that wasn't quite so easy to find out about it but it wasn't impossible to find out about it I found out that the men lived behind barbed wire and were locked in at night and had to sleep on hard cement floors forty to one hundred in a single windowless room and had to live without their women because it would have cost the company a little. If their families had been brought there and I don't doubt a great many other things and of course tried to take pictures to show this and it wasn't always so easy to get them but I decided that it wasn't just the single picture that counted it seems to me that of a photographer knows the truth he thinks of it perhaps. And when you're getting permission to do something you don't. That's in the photographer's mother and he shows one single piece of the mosaic and usually it isn't too hard to proceed step by step and. Should Know the truth if. The truth is. I do. Necessary to go far. From the truth like South Africa or India for example. India that's. The point to. Me I was taking pictures in a college and I was rather shocked to. Talk of. Their segregation in. The. Us in some of these colleges. And I found that pretty shocking. And I spoke to students after class and one who turned to me and he said you talk about your democracy but how can. You have democracy in America when you do not give rides to. Since then that was a. Great strides have been taken of course the trend started much earlier to give equal citizenship. And I think to take pictures. Which. I think that we can find in our own country. We can find in the good things about. The important that. Are true. And our conception. And. Our pictures. And we. Thank you. Because. Life itself. For Atlanta. And. Its. So go. Bring him into the picture because he presents. A face to photography that is not represented here at the table Harry Callahan is one of the important younger photographers who takes the end of stick Madeline's into his confidence as he probes and searches into the realm of pattern texture and design he's continually exploring both himself and in the realms of places people and things that are contrasts and relationships Callahan is no respecter of standard technical formula for colds is an erring sense of pattern is an entire interview or part of his photography and not the thing by itself let me look like an abstraction extra me stands for an intensification of reality. Because walk around. After living with the museum's collection of photographs for three years. I find the intrinsic merit and the L.A. of nest of a photograph is put to a severe test in the frequent handling and consideration I have had to give to the put AGA photographs in our collection. And Walker Evans photographs always remains a particularly stimulating experience his photographs are a visual demonstration. Of the good to be a reference to dusting Odyssey the thing in itself he pens down incisive images of people and places soften down with a sprinkling of the Humpty Dumpty of things personal opinions are and that are in evidence facts unrelieved and unretouched are the order of the day because he is one of the group in this panel that was awarded the Guggenheim final fellowship Walker haven't. Received. Base a give me for reading. Not a scrap expected to play without the music before him. I felt sure that someone tonight would call his paper is painting an art what is modern photography is really too much of a subject for me. I'd like to be allowed to abuse my privileges to accept an extent. I don't see how anyone can be interested in a photograph that isn't either original or daring or beautiful or. Somehow on a like coinage and I choke on the word modern use in connection with the qualities of photography is the product of a modern invention and we all know that some of it is testing with attitudes and states of mind that were valueless in the time of Alpha by these. There are photographic styles of recent and very interesting but it's good to call any of the modern We have to remember that in the one nine hundred twenty S. and someone before modern man tonality and cacophony and music and abstraction and various distortions and painting and communicable subjective imagery and poetry and automatic writing and Prose yet we were stimulated by Schonberg and striven skin Brock Modigliani crane and Stein because they were artists not because they were freaks trying to traffic and something called Modern in photography I don't see a good picture usually show the relation to its period I'd say for example it gives you a feeling that he belongs very much to the parents of his days and Brady seems rooted in the American atmosphere here and probably there is only a remote connection between my points here but think how much each of these men has contributed to current photography Brady is doubly interesting as a foreigner his studio portrait lighting has turned up in recent fashion photography and his beautiful straight field reporting style is still imitated. As for R.J. I suppose John could produce a comparable photographic poetry of the streets if you set out to do it but I just sustained performance can still serve as a model I think his use of dawn lighting was partly a matter of convenience but it's nonetheless influential. I seem to be approaching the ultimate twist of our stuff title into what is not modern photography but I think I can hold myself to one obvious point here which is that the camera work that strained after monetarism just after the first world war of distinctly not now modern photography. It's just excruciating the dated is Francis X. Bushman's profile. We're allowed by the perspectives tonight to bring analysis to the subject under cover this I'd like to close with a theoretical know about the motivations of the photographer. It seems that sites are images or objects become a very active challenge to a man who works with cameras if you think hell to attack them in a sense to back them sometimes as a collective sometimes he's Hamlet looking for a cure for paralysis of the will sometimes he's the little boy who's never gotten over the stories of Teddy Roosevelt in Africa at the big game and any of that is more indiscriminate moments he is the slave of this craft to such an extent that he may think can I ever go out into the street with seem. He goes on though and incurably the last thing I should want to do is to speak a sentimental Apollodorus for him but it's quite another thing to feel the impact of those working in this medium or born artist. Moore. Thank you all perf. As I said these. Papers are all placed alphabetically. Afraid that. They might think that we were deliberately forcing contrast. This one. Concerns Louis for who is far. In the last few years. A lyricist with a camera has been wandering the highways and byways of New York. So searing sadness and tender love whisperings crackling gayety continually appear in the front of his camera as if by magic. In the world of today it is a heartening experience to know and to know the young to as far as I quote his statement quote photography determines the entire pattern of my existence and my existence and that existence is concerned with the salable commodity the remaining have constituted an uncompromising passion that manifests itself in a search to grasp and hold that fraction of a section second that often hold the answer to the complexities of life nothing is too unimportant for me to observe the wild desire to see and record all things and the unlikeliness of my achieving them. Resulted in my persistent use of the camera I carry it almost constantly from which prints I extract the examples that life itself teaches to me the symposium is the combine focusing of ideas tonight one cannot help but feel again the purest spirit in American place. John meaning. John mealies a third restless and exuberant experimental experiment or an innovator of methods and techniques at a time when scientists and sportsman were all agog with the information and measurements revealed by a two thousand stroboscopic sequence pictures. Beyond merely was to realize that's for me. In a short time he had developed this trouble scopic technique into a new and creative medium that crisp flickering interruptions of a Martha Graham does gesture could have both the unfolding of the petals of a flower this photograph of the musical festival of progress with indicate the finale mealies again opening new Darkness maybe. You'll. There is no such thing as modern of a top. This. And that is the lack of it. I can only tell you what I consider photography to be baited into and on my own feet. I am concerned in my own think yours let's move on because life is movement on the death of a. Person sleeping still breathing the person thinking the seemingly immobile project the sense of organic agitation and you can be even more than us in physical exercise. When a photograph does not express the movement it ceases to represent life. It becomes to me is the meaning that. In Motion Pictures we express when by actually recording in still photography we express movement by side and singing it. By that a single and I mean creating any major city things all the details very sharply but he got a list of the name to speed of the movement I do not see any virtue in learning. Learning in Apollo gravity is a virtue only by accident. Every We along with some sixty was a million Americans I looked through a certain Victor magazine. Page after page a roll by before I acted to make a stop. Being a photographer the first thing I do is to look for the candid line. Sometimes I might even with. Invariably I ask myself the same thing. What is in that makes this one photograph more compelling than the scorn I have so casually bad by what does a stinker have which makes me wish I had taken and. The answer is always the same time. To compel instead to create impact that photograph lead to India and in which has more meaning to us then these we had actually ourselves witnessed the whole event ID before this to me is the heart of photography to create an impact a photograph listed in the field and the incident which has more meaning to us. Then Eve we had actually ourselves witness the whole event I will give you an example from my own experience. I was assigned to cover the first Lloyd Lewis walk at five which took place at Madison Square Garden during the winter of one thousand nine hundred forty seven I think it was the face of the family if you want to be exact. In handing me the assignment the editors were very explicit and bring back a picture of the knockout they said. Everybody expecting was going to go down. As it turned out everybody had guessed wrong Actually it was Joe Louis and not gloss but went down and very likely for me he went down to glad. I could hardly believe my own eyes when I solo it fall for the first time and was so Weatherly unprepared that I missed it completely. Fortunately as I said Job lights. And when the second knobs on the could I was ready for that and thought I'm dead on. You may possibly have seen this photograph which covered during a fairly large section of the audience behind the action show the split second when Joe Lewis is hitting the camera. Now the I could not legally perceive and the spectators could hardly allies the impact of this sudden happening which was reflected not so much in Lewis's all who are calling for them but in the variety of feelings on the spectators own faces. The majority of the spectators were certainly not conscious of what they were doing feeling or thinking at that particular moment. But looking at the boiler graph and read respect we are able to discern for instance who long ago is president are calling unconcerned or to slow to react and who are shouting the want to watch which gives a link diety and those who are shocked rigid by what is happening each phase in some peculiar story. And by a thousand accurately in court the details we are now able to reconstruct almost at a glance. This overpowering mask emotion which is released by the spectacle of the public by. This then. Resting room capturing the precise instant which can create by means of us never shop and then its meaning for the whole event or human action constitutes in my opinion that through time the problem of a double. Digit. Thank you John merely. Our next. Subject. And the lovely shock of white hair down my left. Claim to be too little. Frightened. Very fresh reader on words and I had to promise that I would read them for. That is least it modelled. Most of the earlier photographs that came under the heading of candid photography candid photographs were little more than a silly or ludicrous snapshot. When that term is applied to the photograph by Liz that modelling takes on new meaning. Camera eye in itself is impersonal. But to the camera. Camera's eye is added her own very personally keen and searching and continually probing and poking with the surface appearances are satire sometimes subtle and I ask again it is just the end boisterous and agency pictures human grace and dignity with them at the ranch or. This is a reset Modelo statement. With instructions to be read with emphasis. To tendencies dominate the field of photography to day one full of artificial subterfuge glamour fantasies and hysterical drives for what is called shock appeal the other striving for sincerity realism and truth. I have often been asked what I wanted to prove by my photography the answer is I don't want to prove anything. The photograph proves to me I am the one who or. Why do you photograph these ugly people who meet these people or not. They are vital personalities that is why life has marked them so sharply. Why do these people look so serious and why not these photographs cannot be published they say too much I am concerned when they don't say enough. These are every day conflict. The camera is the means of it action it shows not only what we already know but can ask explore new aspects of a constantly changing world new images around us everywhere they are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear. To find these images is to dare to see to be aware of what there is and how it is the photographer not only gets in for more information he gives information about life what is more the information is given on a mass scale the camera works fast so does the photographer within the second yes to see and feel to understand and to select to react and to act movement and expression and seen before it is stopped a moment is captured that never was and never will be again. Speed the fundamental condition of our day's activities is the power of photography and Modern Art of today the art of the split second. Right Morris. You come up here more I think you're probably doing. Right Morris is the literary man in this group. Poet and novelist. Yes reduced to you know the books. The inhabitants. And all but he's published by Scribner himself. In these his text and his photographs work together as a unit. The pictures do not illustrate the text and the text does not illustrate the picture there are one. Let me read to you what Lewis McChord had to say about the right worship homeplace. I began the most placed on my own home place in Dutchess County and I finished a book and I learned not far from the scene of write north of double barreled work of art. The stuff of which he has composed his book is so genuine they don't let hurt right Marsters writing has the density of an experience that has been lived and relived in the mind until the depth of a lifetime can come forth in a single casual episode. As far as photographs there is poignant and feeling and they are skillful in technique. Maurice makes the rubbish left by the past lives for the grand a human foot has walked on more plain and with human experience than most but agressor capable of making of the human face. In right Morse's own place we have one of the most original words of our generation is likely to see. More. Than you're. Somewhere in Walden Rose says if you stand right running and face to face to a fact you will see the sun glimmer on both its circuses like a cemetery in feel it's we did to dividing you through the heart in America and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it like what that we crave only reality if we are dying let it do the rattle in our throat and feel the cold in the extremities. If we are alive that is go about our business. This package illuminates for mean the business of photography. It is not a definition. But it is as close to a definition as I can to get what the photographer feels when confronted with the fact is what the bowler should feel when confronted with a photograph. A shock of recognition. There is no definition that will substitute for this. Man I've always wanted some litmus test or some species of art sensitive Geiger counter that would settle them once for all the perplexing problems of art happily there is none we have to print this fact ourselves face to face. But TALK OF THE began by think with this shock of recognition a man with or without a camera face to face to look back to the camera can come along later or the facts may be lost. On the ground glass it may look like something else we seem to be born a race of interpreters. The man who buys a camera sees the world through the eyes of the camera as others see it through art literature or some doggedly. The last times we use it ever our own the word genius by and large is the term we reserve for those men who with eyes of their own look about them. And report on what they see. As I believe that a man self-made dividing from his subject self-expression is not a fruitful use of the targeting the personality of the photographer if that is the subject belongs in front of the lens not behind. The camera itself then the apparatus is just one more thing in my opinion that can separate us from reality. Not long ago I received a photograph on which I found the following information for the five Speed Graphic to a flash bulb faster than film one one hundred second at F. a level. Did this machine take the picture. I'm inclined to think it did. It not merely did it was expected to. I have not as yet been asked what typewriter it is that writes my books but I am always ask what camera took my photographs. It is led me to the opinion that when a man picks up the camera he loses sight of both the subject and the photograph. The glamour that he sees as the play of light on the chrome surface of some gadget and this we did that he feels is the one that comes through his pocketbook. But I doubt if any subject is less academic than the one we have under discussion. What is the targeting whatever it is and wherever it is I think it is becoming a public menace. The word shield is photographers use it is both actors and prophetic. And the word candid like the button passed up to initiate some political convention seems to permit the bear to shoot anything in sight. He invariably does. His favorite hunting grounds or those usually marked Private keep out and his favorite game is somebody's private life if the camera is white and our eyes and it is narrowed to the point of strangulation the still point on which we all stand our privacy. The conception has grown largely through practice but what is private is meant to be exposed and there is at the wrote something suspicious about privacy like certain paths the words are not opposed to for man or Judith down and the pill that rare can be sold on the market for a pretty good price. If this is art it is also politics. It has a good deal to do in my opinion with that latest vanishing American the uncommon man. Photography is still magic perhaps that is the gist of it. There is about this too like the alchemy a stone Something that but which is the minds of men and makes it use or a force for evil or a force for good. The man with the camera like the man with the plague is carefully kept out of certain places but what he should be absolutely forbidden is let him there is no close season apparently on our privacy the photographer more than other craftsman is engaged in an endless wrestle with the devil. With every snap of the shot and he tells a big lie or a small truth that terrible moment that the camera does not lie in our time has come home to haunt us it's not merely lies that lies and exhaustively. It were better to say that it seldom tells the truth and that it is in our public life the number one lie. And years ago when I was off hunting myself. A man at my back standing at the edge of a cone failed fired a hail of singing buckshot over my head he missed me but he had what he was aiming at he was aiming at the fellow who would invade his privacy. Thanks to this man I was brought face to face with the fact that I would rather have avoided. The one that lies I think at the heart of photography because I believe a great photograph by never an issue is the invasion of some kind of privacy whether it is a chair a child or the water bed scattered on some beach How can this invasion be justified. I have no answer I am not sure that an answer exists. The presumption under which I labor is that I am something of an artist and that these are the materials with which I work but I notice that I work less and less. That there are more and more photographs that I do not take. I believe that privacy is so rare in our time that it has about it something wholly. And I ponder the right of any man to look in upon me. To reduce that is our dwindling supply of this commodity. If a man feels that he must let him first know what he is about. He can acquire this knowledge in my opinion by turning to the photographs of Walker Evans where there is Revelation boldness and always great delicacy if he can meet and sustain such standards let him work if he cannot let him hold his peace. The things that interest me for a photographer photographically are those that speak for themselves sometimes I feel that everything visible does. I confine myself however to the language that I think I understand that which is spoken by houses and the things that are handled by man manhandled as a rule and worn out. These things are a species of photographs in themselves the two of the bears the imprint of many hands the bed that holds the impression of many bodies. And the house it wears like an album the look of the inhabitants. Upon these things on a photographic plate man has left the impressions that I find both revealing and eloquent they made a witness but they do not need an interpreter. As I am a writer I use these photographs in relation to words I Have That is a form problem I want the photograph to exist by itself I want the words to stand by themselves I do not want illustration that is from either medium the solution I have found has been dictated by these tours. It seems to me that the problem of photography text from Tir that invites many crossings is at root a simple problem of integrity one medium should not slightly corrupt the related one. It should be a marriage of independent minds. And not an arrangement by which one mind enters a permanent slavery on my way here tonight I read that anybody anybody can take a good picture. Better that is than those you have in your pocket right now. It has been the purpose of the industry to make it easy to take pictures but this makes it hard it seems to me to take photographs as a matter of fact I ever I look forward to the automatic camera the one that dispenses that is without doubt the cameraman the human element is always unreliable. Why not let some fool proof gadget even the camera then shoot it off. If anybody can do it certainly some gadget can do it better. And until that occurs I'm afraid we will lack the target for years. We will go on asking what is the talk if. It will not be clear until the end I think that the good pictures can be taken by cameras photographs are what you get from photographers. Pakman. Thank you right Morris. That's nations of documentary photography very like so many words this one has taken on meanings beyond those given in the dictionary. In spite of an uninformed insistence that the image. Documentation deals with exclusively is slums and film. Documentary photographer does center around the general theme of human relations and of how people live. In the work of a photographer on the page this documentation of what we are like and how we live also begins to reveal and express some of the whys in these human relations and human questions and equations. On the page like. The previous speaker write more of those received and worked up going on fellowships you're paid. At best. I've felt that some responsibility to talk a little bit tonight about the. New Directions that you had that young so-called documentary photographers are taking. I think these directions are or. Will become more of them as time goes on. In general. I think there has been a trend. Away from the old documentary stand by of objective reporting. Toward a more. Intimate. Personal. And subjective. Way of photographing. But I think specifically. There are there are two trends and that seem to me to be very important. One trend has as a positive view to it. It records life and is as healthy vigorous and even sometimes humorous. It does this without being incipit. I think it's something new. And welcome. In this in this. Field of just being criticized so often for photographing. Despair and deprivation. I think. To people particularly. With working in the dark but smoko are or here are very representative here. Photographed are easy to look out there there are. Many other make you want to laugh or at least. Mild yourself. And all in all the way they leave you with a feeling that it all is not lost in this world or. The other the other training. Leader leaves office I think in the opposite direction. It's an attempt to get at that new kinds of realities. Realities which to the clear explicit. Images of. Much for the productive and the work are unable to record. For this reason. I think many of the people who. Were important in this trend are breaking up their images. They're concerned I think not so much with with the with the but out of life but with the why. They. They ask questions rather than answer them. In this. Regard I think as far as. A very good. Very representative. Talking for their. Work while those already spoken of but. My own impression of his work. This is that it's. It's probing it's disturbing to me and strangely but well. I think that that he brings. The world reality to you with whom you are. And his images are to me quite exciting. It does leave me to. Rest in wondering. Why he has he has captured a certain amount of good seems to me of mystery in his images and there's room in them for your for your mind to want it to moment explore. I think you know both of these trends Although although quite dissimilar are healthy first of all release of book and the second because it. Is for just the. True while perhaps the confusion that we all feel to some extent. In this world today. I think they will gain support from other talkers as time goes on a matter of fact and the people I mentioned are represented there are many other. People who are working in these directions and I think that there is as time goes by it will become by the additions to the group the be talking entry idea. Thank you all have made. Her think that. Irving Penn is one of the most versatile photographers among professional illustrators of today. I am up to the opinion no other photographer has been able to do so regularly and consistently produce the feeling of elegance so characteristic in the Penn fashion photograph. And series of portraits of artists actors writers and musicians are produced vigorous discussions of arguments pro and con. But I believe any push for all photographs all made and all that photographic gallery in the room represent its finest publishing cheap and they constitute a remarkable document. And a revelation of the timelessness and human dignity of the people. And. Ah. I don't know what to say except to say that modern photography is probably nothing more than the work of a sound contemporary. Creative photographer and by that I mean its kind of style. The modern photographer stands in for the fact that an issue of LIFE magazine will be seen by twenty four million people. It is obvious to him that never before in the history of mankind has anyone working in the visual medium been able to communicate so widely. He knows that in our time it is the privilege of the photographer to make the most vital visual record of man's existence. The modern photographer having as ever have most creative people the urge to communicate widely is inevitably one of the medium which offers him the fullest opportunity for this communication. He then works for publication he has become in fact a journalist he communicates the look of a war battlefield or the look of a movie actress informs his readers of the new twist of a hip blunderbuss production he studies the tribal rights of African natives and publishes his documents in a small edition book or he makes a photograph itself so. For whatever vehicle he chooses. For the modern photographer the end product of his efforts is the printed page not the photographic print. The technical limitations of his medium are the limitations not of the sensitive photographic the theory but the limitations of the reproduction process by which the printed page is made the modern photographer works within these technical limitations he even uses them to his advantage. He is not surprised and saddened by the published result he has to a great extent prevision to. The craft of the modern photographer has two aspects. Of his first mechanical chemical The camera has in fact become his appendage he uses it easily as uses hand his relationship to the chemistry was technique is not very different from the relationship of a good cook to the Roma to aerials of a dinner. But it is in the second aspect in the human emotional realm but the modern photographer has become especially scale. His personal evolution is heightened his ability to experience people and objects when language is in had a good he fills a gap or gesture or gravity or a caress he finds somehow a common ground the mind of the target for is not a horse not he brings equal interest and devotion to the problem of photographing it we need a chair a fashion model a soldier a horse he finds something of himself and everything and something of everything in him so the modern photographer is very conscious of the time element in the viewing of his work he knows that his communication must be made quickly you know that his picture may as often be seen hurriedly in a dentist's waiting room as in a soft chair after dinner. Consideration of this time element the modern photographer has learned the economy of means of the graphic artist he has just to this economy and has made an almost instinctive part of his craft. The modern photographer has found many of his roots in the simple and communicable journalistic statements of don't mean the direct boy and both sides since the modern photographer is by motivation a journalist his communication and sympathy go out rather to the man who reads the magazine in the dentist's office than to the man who walks through a museum of photography on Sunday. The modern photographer does not think of photography as an art form or of his photograph as an art object but every so often in this medium as in any creative medium some of the practitioners are artists in modern photography that which is art is so as the byproduct of a serious and useful job soundly and loving be done. Then shine like one Previn's or one of the original group of grey strikers I fish a photographic unit. And dish contribution there represents one of the peak attainment in modern and documentary photography. He has on occasion you just photograph his notes for his painting but the photographs have an inherently intimate and concrete quality in themselves. To Talk To be isn't it Julie Julie or me and complementary medium in the work. Of a significant modern painter. Bench on. Which. You can see this wonderful doodle here is not. Oh I also wish my name were all bright. You know. I look over these few notes that I made here and everything has been said but everything. All I've got now is a terrible feeling of frustration and jealousy. Margaret Bork White tells glowing about South Africa. I wish I could have been there. I've never seen Joe Louis I'm knocked out once knocked down. And then I feel like an interloper here you know I'm not really a photographer I've taken some photographs. I haven't I haven't taken any and twelve years and called me I protested and then I remember then a few weeks ago I had taken a camera and gone down to see the festival of San Gennaro so that qualified me again as a doctor. My beginning was in a way really the best anyone going to have. A Walker Evans and I live together and I thought should I ever want to go into photography I take a look down upon a little bit but you never want to go in far I've got the best teacher in the world I thought well my brother gave me a camera and I said if I can get something in a magazine off the first stroke and I have the camera for good he said yes and I got something in the magazine of the first row by the way I've never gotten a sense for anything I'm I'm very much. Well anyway when I got the camera and I. Asked Walker for instruction and he was busy at the time on several occasions and walk out wonderful opportunity to go to Cuba and I got desperate I've got to have this conference with him and find out all about photography and as he was rushing off his back he said F. nine on the sunny side and therefore five. I've been working there. Take a meter and about two hundred temperature. I think it's. Time. Now I can. Talk about what is better. I can tell you. I think. Because. You know what. One thing. I think. The matter of communication is a matter of communication. And. Human. And I have. A problem. Showing. That interest me. I work with because I can carry around these the OR I work. Very easily I. Find. I work with my having. I feel so much looking over my shoulder at something a kind of a guilty feeling about it and because I think it does mean of communication I probably a very slight interest in what is called the print quality I have found a picture taken and whether they're sixty four. Will reproduce on a sixty line screen about the same way as one they can live like another camera and blown up to that side. Do not reproduce in a mass. Publications are reproduced so slightly that for me the effort was not worthwhile The one other thing that has. Never been a probably. I have been asked about photography have talked at some schools about painting but they rather I would talk about photography about coffee. And to the immediate question is how did you get all this. Because Mr Moore said it so much better but I must say something something that I did. I was asked to contribute something to that U.S. camera and nobody asked me why I got up at this hour why I photographed these particular people in this particular background why I wanted people to see those people they asked me how I did and by God I told them how I did it I gave them a set of impossible conditions and they printed them. Well. You know in a symposium. Few months ago Mr Ritchie defined symposium as really a drinking bout. There isn't anything here that would justify that definition but I. Did I did and I would like very much to hear some exchange of ideas so if I have spoken less than five minutes I now surrender it and hope that we can get into some kind of a symposium Thank you. Thank you bench on. Some of the very very young photographer that I meet today. Under the impression that photography were discovered about the time they took it up. And they're astonished to find out that a painter admiring results I recognized one of our finest photographer for World War One. When she began his memorable series of photographs and paintings of old Pennsylvania by. They are also unaware as are nineteen twenty seven Charlie Sheen are not great in the era and a deluge of industrial photography with. The Ford plant. Is currently exploring and prodding among the canyons gripers of New York City it continually comes up with new dimensions and new horizons and photography and in his painting. People are reading another one of those papers I'd like to remark very presently that I wish Ben Shawn's name began with Z.. Otherwise it's all right. Well this is going on ice for some time. Do you realize that of all the discussion of the question is the talk of the art were laid in and that they would expand from here going nowhere. In the meantime photography is promising is it child and there are high hopes support in its adulthood those of us who have been great back playing with a camera are happy to see the application of the CAGR free and constantly increasing fields as a means of oppression like aggression it is only limited by the caliber of the operator the mark progress in optical correction as well as increased speed to blend. Has in these recent years greatly enlarged our acquaintance with the big who a world. Man has produced which in this respect is better than he's down. With this and other greatly increased facilities at the disposal of the photographer he is more and more free to move around in the larger world which has been offered to him with the increase in his vocabulary and it is his responsibility. As well as his privilege to endeavor to extend the field of application it is true that increased visibility is are not one mixed blessing for something again there is the danger of something lost. There seems to be a few prevalent here but the sheer weight of numbers is a virtue which with the help of America can only result in better photographs it is easy to forget that we only take out that which we have put in gone now the days we hope when it was thought to be desirable to offer an apology for a photography being the young need medium that it is by the dismal failure to disguise it as. Of the graphic art there is a tendency to think that painting and photography are converging road. That photography is a shortcut to an equivalent bending. This bit only bring us back to the brown which hope could be a crayon drawing why make the same mistake again when there are so many new ones that can be mined. There is a tendency in current abstract photography to disguise the source Niger by using on identifiable form this is to encroach upon the field of painting the searching is capable of discovering in nature a combination of forms which when recorded and presented in a brand have astonished those who have missed this. This can be abstraction. With a credit line good nature. Well nature has an underlying abstract structure and it is within the province of the art and the search for it and to select and rearrange the forms for the enhancement of his design it is also within the province of the photographer to seek the same underlying abstract structure and having found it to his satisfaction to record it with his camera with an exact because it would not be achieved through any other medium The result is an enemy. Which has passed through a lens and having been projected on a sensitized a monkey makes and then offer of a record of the things. Which. Thank you John XXIII. Next guest. Is among those not present. This Frederick summer. And summer's work the acid bite because you are some modern and mystic might lenses is carried to the ultimate in objective Precision is a poet statement but it is given emphasis by the peculiarities of your sound in the position. That in his writings gives all. Resemblance to the usual pictorial tourist for the picture is gone. For. Paragraphs in the summer staple and he never made photograph is unavoidably witness. And the present patients are subject matter. But that a photograph to be really alive must necessarily extend its documentation to the poetic and speculator motives involved in making the photograph researching what extent one of the conscious and unconscious motivating forces must be an inseparable aspect of the organisation of the photograph or next but form gives there because erm Siskind come up here in. New Jersey or photographers just getting began being noticed as one of the younger documentary photographer who according to the records of the time made pictures representing certain aspects of the seamy side of life which then came you know of the education school by people who want their photography slick and pictorial each airfield in recent work is centered around rather precise dynamic and realistic rendering of objects surfaces pictures and. Is a work of several occasions here at the museum and these other one man show at the even gallery and several museum struck the country and says. I want to try to make a very limited personal statement and tempt to describe as precisely as exactly as I can what I think my photographs are. Not wait perhaps we can have a sort of play. In the public so. When I make a photograph I wanted to be an altogether new object. Complete and self-contained whose basic condition is order on like the world of events and actions whose primary condition is change and disorder. The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three other things the objective world is permanent condition is change and disorder the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized and the experience which brings them together first and particularly I accept the flat plane of the picture surface as a primary frame of reference of the picture the experience itself may be described as one of total absorption in the object but the object serves only a person only and the requirements of the picture. Thus rocks are sculpted phones bits of shattered glass clinging to a window frame a total the top of a tenement newel post a terrible mask seaweed bothered by a way of figure with its convoluted got a plain view a section of common decorative aisle work springing rhythmic shapes. Fragments of paper sticking to a wall a conversation piece a shadow on a fence an image of buyers. And these poems totems masks figures shapes images but finally take their place in the tone field of the picture and stick and strictly conform to the new space environment the object has entered the picture in a sense it has been photographed directly but it is often an recognise about or has been removed from it usual context. This is associated from its customary neighbors and forced into new relationships what is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world has been suggested that the shapes and images are underworld characters the inhabitants of that bass common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control it may be they are the different you're more of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed with point in that direction however I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture while I am conscious talking to my feel above all is the picture I am making the relation of the pictures to others I have made and more generally relations of others I think. Or maybe just are not among those present but I can't resist bringing in the fabulous week. With the first press photographer to move from the people of but news reporting. And become a photographic commentator well as the original major claims to fame are probably pretty police and fire pictures. There stand record reaches to the naked city and reaches people. Perfect profession of human for things and emotion. For progress he did not read in the United States of America we would surely have to invent him. Picked up from clips from some of the. Train the media photograph is a page from life and that being the case it must be real. Don't forget about anything and everything else to be human think feel when you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph when you laugh and cry with their laughter and cure. You will know you're on the right track one doesn't just go up to strange men women children elephants or giraffes and say look this way please laugh cry shows an emotion or go to sleep underneath the funeral kind of thing they would have called me crazy and called the cops would have called the wagon with the guys in white and I would have found up in the psychopathic ward Bellevue Hospital in the straight jacket. Pictures are different the photographer missed be on the scene at the split second of occurrence Here's my formula being as I do with human beings and I find them wonderful I leave them alone and let them be themselves only cans with love light in their eyes sleeping or merely walking down the street the trick is to be where people are all one needs to do is to be on the spot alert and human I think the secret is knowing what you want I worked for years. Then there were no more gangsters no really good murders so I got a job with doing fashion photography. They always sent a girl along to see that I didn't steal the silverware. So I got tired of fashions and went to Hollywood I've appeared in five pictures a street photographer the greatest bit of casting since Lassie was. To fill an important gap and a symposium. I'm going to read a few excerpts pertinent to the topic from the writings of Edward Weston. These are mainly excerpts from the recent book published by Virginia Adams and the Mifflin Company of Boston titled my camera and point global. Photography as a creative expression or what you will must be seeing Blatter. Being alone means factual recording photography is not at all seeing in the sense that I see it is not seeing literally. It is seeing with intention with reason and idea just as abstract as could be conceived by sculptor a painter can be expressed through objective recording with a camera because nature has everything that can be possibly be imagined by the artist and the camera controlled by wisdom goes beyond statistics I do not know any formal rules of composition nor do I recognize any boundaries just subject matter subject matter is everywhere it may be you know shoe cloud or my own backyard I do not attempt to copy nature present factual records I depart from literal rendering to whatever extent is necessary for the present ation of my response to the subject I control each step of the photographic process in order to carry out accurately my original vision I am not a technician and have no interest in technique for its own sake. My technique is adequate to present my scene and I need nothing more. Photography has long been considered a mass production meeting medium from the standpoint of unlimited duplications of prints but that is a factory job requiring standardization. Beyond the scope of the individual who uses the tag if he has a creative expression. But the mass production of duplication not the mass production of duplication but the become possibility for mass production of original work I have long felt one of the talk of these most important potentiality is for the artist. Unlike other mediums of expression that demand greater or lesser expending of time for the rate realization of an original vision the actual making of a photograph is accomplished so to speak in a moment not as a writer makes notes for future elaboration to a story not as a painter make sketches that will later be worked into a picture. Not into the idea of the suggestion but the whole picture is made on the US so nearly do conception execution coincide they may be said to be simultaneous until a photographer has this achieved discipline coordination you cannot have full command of his medium and his work will be governed to a greater or lesser degree by the accidental when he has achieved discipline a lot of the as well as the quality of his work would be limited only by his ability to see by the quality and what if he ever has vision. Artists fine one don't copy nature. And when they do record quite literally the present ation is such as to arouse connotations quite apart from the subject matter the camera recording nature Exactly and yet be used to convey an abstract idea peppers I reproduced inside seed catalogs they have no relation to my peppers I am not a reformer a missionary a propagandist I have one clear way to give to justify myself as part of the whole through my work here in Carmel I can work and fair here and from here I send out the best of my life focused on to a few sheets of silver paper. Everybody is a very sick man. His couple has the same. Disease that. Eugene O'Neill is suffering. In spite of that he's taken up color photography which lets the energy. And. Showed some of these color photographs in the exhibition of color photography we have here. I would like to feel that I have your. Approval. And sending a telegram to night. Progressed. Much. Giving him our former salutation Now the fun can begin probably recognized by this time. Why. So many. Completely variable factors have been brought into this planet now I hope we can stick them at each other. When I ask them to. Answer the papers or ask any questions that occur to them. To see if we can't carry this further. Thank. The mayor Tory I'm of the Museum of Modern Art you've just heard a panel discussion on the topic what is modern photography moderator for the symbols in was Edward Steichen director of the department of photography for the Museum of Modern Art and the noted American photographers but dissipating in the discussion of Margaret quite Walker Evans John Millie. Wright Maurice Paige. And Ben Shon Giles Sheeler and Aaron Cisco thank you this is been another feature presentation. Is First Annual American art festival we return you now to our studios this is the municipal Broadcasting System.