Though I have been writing poetry for over half a century, I cannot say I know where poetry comes from, but I know it is very hard to make a poem from a work of visual art. I said I'd try and with a great box of Steve's prints before me, I was surprised to see how words quickly started to appear and shape themselves into lines and eventually poems. In every case it was his visual magic that inspired the poem. So these poems are a real monument to our years of friendship and work together.   -John Wood

Metzner's devotion to beauty and to art has brought us back to the body, to Apollo, Berger, Modigliani, Paglia, and to Yeats. But more importantly it has brought us back to the greatest faith, the rapturous, life-changing "faith of love" through art.  -John Wood

Charles Grogg's photographs are hauntingly beautiful and hauntingly strange. They are strange in a way that most 'strange' photographs are not. There is no violence, no brutality, no shock but the shock of authentic art, the shock that forces a viewer back again to look at them and keeps them as fresh on the one hundredth viewing as they were on the first. But they are indeed strange, strange in a way the work of absolutely no other photographer I have seen is strange. Strings and wire are often an integral part of a Grogg photograph, and though that is interesting and connected to their strangeness, it is not at the core of it. The strangeness lies both in their tetherings, their connections, and also in Grogg's deliberate disconnecting of parts of a photograph. It is as if he is not only the archetypal deity Romanticism yearned for, the one that unites 'man and beast in the round of their need,' but also the great god Shiva, who both destroys worlds and dances them back from chaos into order.  -John Wood

Rondal Partridge is one of the greatest and most visually exciting photographers of the twentieth century. His vision is thoroughly and completely his own, and that his name is not yet enshrined in the pantheon of the other greats is a tragic accident of photographic history, an omission which likely has more to do with his mother's great fame than with a serious consideration of his art.

Partridge, born in 1917, was raised in a family of artists, began photographing at fifteen, at seventeen began assisting Dorothea Lange, at nineteen became an assistant to Ansel Adams, and by the age of twenty-three was working as a professional photographer. He has also produced and directed films and been a university lecturer on photography. His work has been the subject of a book, "Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge," and the film "Outta My Light!" His work was included in Edward Steichen's Family of Man exhibition and has been published in Horizon, Fortune, Harper's Bazaar, Life, Look, and all the major magazines.   -John Wood