Annals of Photography #1

George R. Lawrence stands astride the lens of his 8 x 4½ ft glass-plate camera, which will be used to photograph Chicago & Alton Railway's Alton Limited. (1900)

Scenes from a Life #21, America #48

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dead Presidents #43

Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln hold hands.
"Led By Lincoln's Principles" New York Mail and Express (August 3, 1904)

Walker Evans Wayside #3

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

History #12, Dead Presidents #43

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress (December 1, 1862)

Alcohol #10, Age of Print #9

Dust jacket to later edition of The Savoy Cocktail Book, by Harry Craddock. The full title of the original was The Savoy Cocktail Book: Being in the main a complete compendium of the Cocktails, Rickeys, Daisies, Slings, Shrubs, Smashes, Fizzes, Juleps, Cobblers, Fixes, and other Drinks, known and greatly appreciated in the year of grace 1930, with sundry notes of amusement and interest concerning them, together with subtle Observations upon Wines and their special occasions.

America #47

Small islands not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverses the common order of nature, it is evident they belong to different systems. England to Europe: America to itself.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

Anniverseries #13

Ships burn in Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941)

Scenes from a Life #20

Kennedy administration Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara play squash. (July 1962)

Opening Lines #6

Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple, et dont l'exécution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme, ce sera moi.

Moi seul. Je sens mon coeur, et je connais les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire n'être fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent. Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre. Si la nature a bien ou mal fait de briser le moule dans lequel elle m'a jeté, c'est ce dont on ne peut juger qu'après m'avoir lu.

Que la trompette du jugement dernier sonne quand elle voudra, je viendrai, ce livre à la main, me présenter devant le souverain juge. Je dirai hautement: Voilà ce que j'ai fait, ce que j'ai pensé, ce que je fus. J'ai dit le bien et le mal avec la même franchise. Je n'ai rien tu de mauvais, rien ajouté de bon; et s'il m'est arrivé d'employer quelque ornement indifférent, ce n'a jamais été que pour remplir un vide occasionné par mon défaut de mémoire. J'ai pu supposer vrai ce que je savais avoir pu l'être, jamais ce que je savais être faux. Je me suis montré tel que je fus: méprisable et vil quand je l'ai été; bon, généreux, sublime, quand je l'ai été: j'ai dévoilé mon intérieur tel que tu l'as vu toi-même. Être éternel, rassemble autour de moi l'innombrable foule de mes semblables; qu'ils écoutent mes confessions, qu'ils gémissent de mes indignités, qu'ils rougissent de mes misères. Que chacun d'eux découvre à son tour son coeur au pied de ton trône avec la même sincérité, et puis qu'un seul te dise, s'il l'ose: je fus meilleur que cet homme-là.


I HAVE begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.

I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mold in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.

I will present myself, whenever the last trumpet shall sound, before the Sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, "Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous, and sublime; even as Thou hast read my inmost soul: Power Eternal! assemble round Thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his
heart, and if he dare, aver, I was better than that man."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, Book I (1782)
English translation, W. Conyngham Mallory

Aviation #12

LZ 129 Hindenburg burns over Lakehurst Naval Air Station, Manchester, New Jersey (May 6, 1937)

My God, I Shot the Wrong Architect #1

Wallace K. Harrison mows his lawn (1947)

Walker Evans Wayside #2

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

Anniverseries #12, Dead Presidents #42

President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy arrive at Love Field, Dallas, Texas (November 22, 1963)

Walker Evans Wayside #1

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

Auden #20, Art #18

Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

Concluding stanza to "Moon Landing" (1968)

Architecture #35

In the end, pure white light was to survive only as the weapon of the Secret Police interrogator, the brain-washer and the terrorist. But before that relegation to the underworld of Western culture, it had almost a two-decade career in the visible and progressive overworld, as architects of the International Style—with the noblest aspirations, and clear consciences which the clarity of the light was supposed to symbolise, no doubt—subjected doctors, art-collectors, publishers, teachers and the other law-abiding bourgeois who were the clients, to Gestapo-style luminous environments, with light streaming from bare, or occasionally opalescent, bulbs and tubes and glaring back from white walls. Even when allowance is made for the fact that many of the interiors they designed were for the specialised purposes of exhibitions, and may have needed unusual intensities of lighting, the published record of the work done by the Bauhaus and like-thinkers down to 1934, combined with the memories of survivors, leaves an impression of a luminous environment close to the threshold of pain, probably mad e tolerable only by the notorious willingness of intellectuals to suffer in the cause of art.

Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969)

Order of the Universe #19

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise" ["Avatares de la tortuga"], Discussion [Discusión] (1932)

Books on Books #4, Order of the Universe #18

The directions in which the tragedy of this planet has trained our human feelings to play, and the combinations into which the poetry of this planet has thrown our human passions of love and hatred, of admiration and contempt, exercise a power for bad or good over human life that cannot be contemplated, when stretching through many generations, without a sentiment allied to awe. And of this let every one be assured—that he owes to the impassioned books which he has read many a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace back to them. Dim by their origination, these emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through life, like forgotten incidents of his childhood.

Thomas de Quincey, "The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power" (1848)

Anniverseries #11, War #11

American soldiers cheering news of the Armistice (November 11, 1918)