I've spent almost my whole life looking at pictures. My childhood heroes were Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Renoir. And so when I'm making a picture of somebody lying on a bed, in my head somewhere is probably there's a muddigliani of a woman lying on a couch. There's lots of precedence for that. So it's in your mind, and it informs the way that you see the world. It would be really easy to say poetry's boring, I don't understand it, or it's just a massive word anyone can do it,. But the more practice I have in being familiar with reading poems, the better I understand them.
When everyone is carrying a camera in their pocket, what raises the act of taking pictures to the level of fine art photography? Jessica Todd Harper, the award-winning portrait photographer, says that it's equal parts mindset and technique--and lots of setting the stage to seize that perfect light. Listen as Harper speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her desire to capture the complexity of life in a single image, why family relationships and home life are her chosen subjects, and the integral role beauty plays in her images, despite its diminished status in art today.