'The collection is based, in part, on pleasure. Sam Wagstaff, an eminent collector, said ‘the pleasure of seeing is like watching people dancing through an open window. They seem a little mad at first, until you realize they hear the song that you are watching.’
Photography is revelatory, both as revelation and as something to revel in. It is unique as an art form. Anyone over the age of ten, at least in the Western world, has seen and considered thousands of images, tens of thousands or more. We make them. We take them. At some point we know the good ones from the bad ones. It may not be so easy to articulate it, but we do know the difference. We don’t necessarily know that about the other arts: painting or dance, theatre or sculpture. With photographs we have our own individual taste and visual sophistication from early on; we recognize the successful images and pass on the bad ones. We see them everywhere: newspapers, magazines, television, billboards; they surround us our entire lives.
The line of shrouded dancers in the Albert Renger-Patzsch is captured like a mysterious wave that is ominous, unsettling and somewhat silly. But it flows and even looks like a piece of music, lyrically curling in an intoxicating way that is sinuous and sensuous. Renger-Patzsch was the progenitor of contemporary German photography.' – W.M. Hunt