Artist, Barbara Morgan: Well, this one is the Spring on Madison Square. My studio was on 23rd Street, on the fourth floor overlooking Madison Square. I had a big heap of negatives I was sorting. And here was a photograph I had just placed in a certain spot and I was really analyzing it, the movement and so on.
At the same time, when I looked out there, I saw people. It was snowy. And people were staggering through the snow. At the same moment, a friend entered my studio, carrying some tulips and said, "Spring is here!" And dropped it on my table. And so then, I just impulsively put the three ideas together, and that was that.
See, when I'm shooting various things, I usually take at least four pictures, even if I think I've got what I wanted the first crack. And then, if I think that, the ones that I discard, that if they have some future potential, I put it in my component file, and I have hundreds of them. (Laughs)
Television/audio interview with “Barbara Morgan,” from the series “Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography” (1981), courtesy of Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Interviewer/Producer; audio/video provided by the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.