Hugh Jones Photography

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence


"If the door of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite".

William Blake


My most important problem was to destroy the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seem fantastic. Because in the world that I was trying to evoke that barrier didn't exist.

Gabriel García Márquez (1969)


What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one…. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one—which is really the realm of the artist.

Federico Fellini

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearances of trees and automobiles and people with reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

Duane Michals


The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...

Jack Kerouac, On The Road, 1957


There's a little bird that somebody sends
down to the earth to live on the wind.
borne on the wind and he sleeps on the wind
this little bird that somebody sends.

he's light and fragile and feathered sky blue,
so thin and graceful the sun shines through.
this little bird who lives on the wind,
this little bird that somebody sends.

he flies so high up in the sky
out of reach of human eye.
and the only time that he touches the ground
is when that little bird
is when that little bird
is when that little bird dies.

Marianne Faithful (this little bird; lyrics by John D. Loudermilk)