A photographer friend had asked for quotes on the ‘feeling’ in photography, and I offered Irvin Penn from a collection I had assembled a while back..
‘A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective’.
This led me to hunt down when / where Penn had said this. It was not at all obvious in a web search, until I came across a scanned copy of Popular Photography, February 1956, on Google Books. This contained a special symposium on the issue of ‘What Makes a Good Picture?’, and it included Penn’s quote.
I could not download the file, but I did take a few screen shots of the appropriate pages.
Penn is the second photographer quoted in the summary pages of the symposium.
Perhaps idle hands during the lockdown?