143.-144.

143 – If Art’s service is but to imitate Nature, then burn all the picture galleries and let us have instead photographic studios. It is because Art reveals what Nature hides that a small picture is worth more than all the jewels of the millionaires and the treasures of the princes.

144 – If you only imitate visible Nature, you will perpetrate either a corpse, a dead sketch or a monstrosity; Truth lives in that which goes behind and beyond the visible and sensible.

Photography is said to be amedium ofmodern art. What is your opinion about this?

It all depends on the way in which photography is used. Its natural purpose and common use is documentary; the more exact and precise it is, the more useful it is.

But undeniably, there are artists who use photography as a medium of expression. But then what they do is no longer an exact copy of Nature, it is an arrangement of forms and colours intended to express something else which is usually hidden by physical appearances.

4 September 1969