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Gernsheim: We have papers from photography--
not only did I collect autographed
letters of famous people in photography or connected with photography,
from Herschel to Taber to Daguerre and all the other the inventors of
photography, but also all the letters of contemporary photographers
that I ever had are here in Texas.
Interviewer: I’ve seen some of those and now I understand
better why there are some of these specific--you wrote questions it appears to...
Gernsheim: Yes. Well the most famous example is one correspondence
I had with G. B. Shaw.
I knew that he had been at some time in his life interested in photography.
Interviewer: He had favored Alvin Langdon Coburn early in his career.
Gernsheim: He had been the trumpet, you might say, of Alvin Langdon Coburn
and to a smaller extent of a man called Alvarez, an architectural photographer,
with whom he was always friendly.
But I also knew that he took photographs.
I had seen some photographs in some periodicals of an earlier period.
I wanted to know exactly what were the ideas that activated him
to take up photography when he did take up photography.
I wanted to have some facts. And through his secretary, whom I knew,
I was able to write to Shaw directly.
And Shaw then wrote, or asked his secretary to write to me,
that I should put questions to him and he would answer those questions.
He allowed me to send twenty questions which had to be typed.
He said everything exactly clearly how he wanted it,
"You can ask me twenty questions,
each question must be typed on a separate strip of paper;
leave space for my answer underneath." And this I did.
And one of the most important questions to me was,
"When did you take up photography?" and "What led you take up photography?"
And that’s how he answered and his answers are reprinted in here:
"I started photography in 1898, when I bought a push-button camera.
I wanted to become originally a Michelangelo;
it was only much later that I turned out to be a Shakespeare."
So I thought it was a very interesting answer.