"The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial."

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Source: Lincoln Kirstein (2012). “Walker Evans: American Photographs: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition”, The Museum of Modern Art

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Lincoln Kirstein

Writer

Lincoln Kirstein was a pivotal figure in American ballet, known for founding the New York City Ballet and promoting arts education.

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"In liberal democracy and anxious anarchy, the traditional classic dance, compact of aristocratic authority and absolute freedom in a necessity of order, has never been so promising as an independent expression as it is today."

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"If one had to define one essential gift with which a dancer needs to be endowed, there might be a rush of answers. A beautiful body, grace of line, graciousness of spirit, joy in the work, ability to please, unswerving integrity, relentless ambition towards some abstract perfection. Certainly all these factors determine a dancer's character, and every element exists in some combination within the performing artist's presence."

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"Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing."

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