The Cod and the Camera

"The photographer," said George Bernard Shaw in 1904, "is like the cod which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity,"

This might suggest infinite frustration, but nearly thirty years before Julia Margaret Cameron had shown why the waiting for success was endurable: "I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied."

The American photographer Diane Arbus thought that "A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know," and Margaret Bourke White also associated mystery with the art of the camera: "Nothing attracts me like a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open."

David Bailey thinks that a good photographer requires imagination. "You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary."

In 1952, Henri Cartier-Bresson gave a detailed account of what was required to take a successful photograph: "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in the fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression." And nearly fifty years later, obituaries of the 97-year-old Alfred Eisenstaedt carried Eisenstaedt's own succinct summary: "It's more important to click with people than to click the shutter."

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