Ann Zane Shanks Book

I am getting rid of books now, in preparation for death one day. Many of them are books of photographs. People photographs (I despise the word portrait, especially for this book) have always been my greatest interest. I don't own this book, but I will buy it, because it deserves a place in a tiny canon. Not every photograph reaches out and grabs me by the balls, of course, but most of them do. And those that do speak clearly about the person: strong, diffident, weak, arrogant, powerful, gentle, sad, kind, and many more subtle characteristics. Cartier-Bresson usually took fifteen or twenty minutes with his subjects. Sometimes, as with Matisse and Ezra Pound, they never spoke a word to each other, and his little Leica just clicked faintly away, as Truman Capote remembered.

I keep opening the book, neurotically, to see what else the pictures are saying. To investigate Colette's expression again, or Marilyn Monroe's décolletage. I am honored and glad that no one ever asked me to write the words for a book of architecture or photographs. I never would, because they are always pathetic.