| A photograph is a most important document,
and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly,
foolish smile caught and fixed forever. - Mark Twain and the Happy Island, Elizabeth Wallace, (1913) |
 AI image created by R. Kent Rasmussen |
| No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody--hunger and thirst and utter
wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes
the meekest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of
ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and a fool an expression
of more than earthly wisdom. If a man tries to look serious when he sits
for his picture the photograph makes him look as solemn as an owl; if he
smiles, the photograph smirks repulsively; if he tries to look pleasant,
the photograph looks silly; if he makes the fatal mistake of attempting
to seem pensive, the camera will surely write him down as an ass. The sun
never looks through the photographic instrument that it does not print a
lie. The piece of glass it prints it on is well named a "negative"--a
contradiction--a misrepresentation--a falsehood. I speak feeling of this
matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic,
a Soloman, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot, and I am neither. - Letter to the Sacramento Daily Union, written July 1, 1866 |
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| Among other honors heaped upon me by Englishmen
was that of being photographed in parliament. I am not a member of parliament.
But neither am I a member of congress. Has any fellow-American suggested
that I should be photographed in congress? No! I blush to say they have
not. And yet here is an honor that might without risk to bestowed on any
great man. However, it was not bestowed upon Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln.
When I saw that photograph, with the mother of parliaments in the background
and realized my advancing years, I said to myself, "here are two noble
monuments of antiquity--two shining examples of the survival of the fittest." - "His Camera Craze," Boston Daily Globe, May 1, 1910, p. 56 |
 July 1907, London England Photograph by Sir Benjamin Stone. |
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