I wrote that I was often asked by students: “If you had to select just one name from the whole history of photography as representative of all that is wonderful about the medium, who would it be?” My answer was always: “Bill Brandt.”

As du Camp wrote, “The risk [of being honest] was great; but we could not let him continue this way, since at stake was a literary future in which we had absolute faith.”

In the ancient Greek world there was no need for contemplation. It was agreed. The greatest sin of all was hubris: an exaggerated pride which leads one to claim more than is one’s due.

” Levitt’s deadpan spunkiness emerges throughout the essay. She is a proud reporter, insisting on the exterior, matter-of-fact, impersonal quality of her work, writes Gopnik. But she refused to become a journalist. “A reporter,” according to Levitt, “says what she sees; a photojournalist sees what everyone else is saying.”

As Woody Allen remarked, “We stand today at a crossroads: one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.”

What I want to know — and I think this is very important because it is at the heart of almost all art education in this country — is there any empirical, verifiable evidence that art education creates “better” human beings or “improves” our culture? If not, then this accepted value of art constitutes merely a cultural belief system and the art-is-g

the words of Groucho Marx: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”

Why, then, do I feel slightly uneasy at the disparity between the opulence of the book and the degradation of its subjects? Some questions have no easy answers, or, as Susan Sontag wrote: “The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”

So strange, so sad that Weegee, writing about Stieglitz, was predicting his own loneliness and decline into obscurity. But Weegee’s book does end on a bright note. Its final words are: “Be original and develop your own style, but don’t forget above anything and everything else…be human…think…feel. When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond bet