(Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, Paris, April 6, 1820 - Paris, March 21, 1910)
"Photography is a wonderful invention, the highest intellectual field
of science and art that sharpens the mind which is available even for the
dumbest. The theory of photography can be taught in an hour; the first ideas
of how to go technically about it in a day. What can’t be taught are the following:
the feeling for light, the changing parts of the day and weather and the artistic
appreciation of effects produced by different sources harmonizing with features
and physical appearance of the person the photographer wants to depict. What
is taught even less, is the understanding of moral intelligence of your subject,
the immediate empathy and delicacy which can put you in sympathy with the
sitter, helps them to follow their normal attitudes, their ideas, according
to their personality, and enables you to make not just a chancy, dreary cardboard
copy typical of the merest hack in the darkroom, but a likeness of the most
unique, favourable and essential kind of picture. I do not consider arrogant
articulating that this is the psychological approach of photography."
