Michael Lesy
Michael Lesy
Michael Lesyis a writer and professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His books, which combine historical photographs with his own writing, include Wisconsin Death Trip, Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life, Visible Light, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties, and Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century with Lisa Stoffer...
across faced levity mark seldom since
You faced front, you seldom smiled, since levity was not the mark you wanted put across your face forever.
thinking years people
For years and years and years... people showed me pictures that had been left unclaimed at big photo-finishers. Sometimes I think it changed my personality, sometimes I wonder if it didn't damage my brain.
dog video looks
Look, I really do not care about you. What I care about is the worlds that you bear witness to. You are nothing more than a dog with a video camera strapped on its back. As you walk the streets looking for a place to mate or piss or eat, the camera is on and we will see the world because of you... You carry the camera and we enjoy the world. (On images as autobiography)
people cameras
Cameras don't take pictures, people take pictures.
jobs ideas looks
My idea of a good job would be to be paid really well to sit on my ass all day to look at pictures.
memories ordinary snapshots
By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust's In Search of Lost Time... but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love.
church important cost
Photographers represented occasions once. You dressed for them as you might for church; they cost money, they recorded important moments.
cut edge family flow frame interval light picture profane revelation sacred stopped sun time
In family snapshots the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.