“I want to be good.”
“Why?”
“I want to be what I admire.”
“Why don’t you want to be what you are?”
8/7/68, Stockholm
We keep getting asked: What are you actually going to be doing in Rochester? The short answer: Making pictures. Looking at pictures. Showing pictures.
The longer answer: Ten of us (Bruce Gilden, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, Larry…
(Source: noahkalina)
Since the seventeenth of August I had grown unimaginative about others, selfishly incurious and sometimes downright hostile. Now, here, some sort of thaw was taking place.
…
I went into the front room and sat down to work. The disabling sluggishness which had dogged me ever since I’d moved here, stagnant as my reflection in the mirror, seemed to have beaten a temporary retreat. It was over two hours before I looked up again, though I had been distantly aware of the sounds of drilling and tapping, finding them reassuring rather than distracting. There was satisfaction in two people working separately but companionably in the flat. It was dignified.
passages from “The Door”
a short story by
Helen Simpson
July 21, 1993. “Where Sharks Face Off With Gentler Souls,” read the headline on an article published that month about the New York Aquarium in Coney Island. “This is a bargain for those in search of the deeper perspective,” wrote the reporter, who traveled there with his son. Or maybe just a scare: “If you were to mix one drop of blood with a hundred million drops of salt water,” he noted, “a shark could detect that drop of blood as far as a quarter mile away.” Photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times