Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I saw this Broken Kilometer, it reminded me of these 1,000 Buddhas. That piece is 1,000 one-meter gold rods, and this is 1,000 pieces of gold gilded wooden sculpture. In terms of design, it's up to the space's character.
Cameras and lenses are simply tools to place our unique vision on film. Concentrate on equipment and you'll take technically good photographs. Concentrate on seeing the light's magic colors and your images will stir the soul.
I always wanted to live in L.A. The other thing that always inspired me was movies; that's why I'm here. I always wanted to be a part of the movie business and make movies. That's why I went to AFI grad school for filmmaking.
Amid countless everyday miracles, I come in contact with something greater than myself and realize I am a part of it... I move in wonder through inspiration, reverence, gratitude, interconnectedness, transcendence, and grace.
If I am lucky, something new and inexplicable often appears in front of my lens. I am always surprised by the mystery of how my best images appear. That excitement and shock of discovery makes my life at these moments a gift.
It seems to me that while it is very important to get a striking picture of a line of smoke stacks or a row of dynamos, it is becoming more and more important to reflect that life that goes on behind these photographs. (1935)
The true art of being young is knowing how to defy gravity and upset as many people as possible while doing it. How to penetrate the great secrets of the universe and damn the torpedoes. How to stir the demons of our destiny.
When you get in the water with a wild animal, you're essentially giving yourself to that animal because, as humans, we're quite helpless and vulnerable in the water. You're at the seal's mercy. You're at the predator's mercy.
The artist is one who makes a concentrated statement about the world in which he lives and that statement tends to become impersonal-it tends to become universal and enduring because it comes out of something very particular.
The one thing that seems to be consistent through all my work that I like, and I experimented a lot, is the viewer is allowed to meditate on something that normally we don't stop and stare at, whether it's people or a cactus.
From the black ocean comes the appearance of light and waves. It helps you imagine birth. I want imagination in the photographs I take. It's like a prologue. You wonder, What's going on? You feel something is going to happen.
One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.
We create these walls between fact and fiction, but often the difference between the two is as little as that between a real name and a pseudonym. So I'm not sure about those walls - certainly not in the realm of visual arts.
If I look at my work from the beginning it is more the idea of trying to establish a kind of material that one can work with for the future, rather than making nostalgic images to record something that will later become lost.
Sure. I’d like to live regular. Go home to a good looking wife, a hot dinner, and a husky kid. But I guess I got film in my blood. I love this racket. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous. It’s funny. It’s tough. It’s heartbreaking.
I was fascinated by the Black Panthers because I'd been in contact with the Nation of Islam, thanks to Muhammad Ali, and their way of talking was that the whites were the devil, and they'd get rid of them once they took over.
I didn't really know who Cassius Clay was. I just wanted to show America through a heavyweight championship fight. Ever since my childhood, I'd been fascinated by the way the whole country becomes polarised around this event.
Movie actors disappear - any young person wouldn't know Cary Grant. They're going to disappear. Fifty years ago, you thought film was here to stay. But nothing is here to stay, actually - except perhaps paintings and drawings.
As great a picture can be made as one's mental capacity-no greater. Art cannot be taught; it must be self-inspiration, though the imagination may be fired and the ambition and work directed by the advice and example of others.
I'm a good craftsman and I can have this particular intention: let's say, I want a photograph that's going to push a certain button in an audience, to make them laugh or love, feel warm or hate or what - I know how to do this.
As photojournalists, we supply information to a world that is overwhelmed with preoccupations and full of people who need the company of images....We pass judgement on what we see, and this involves an enormous responsibility.
The snapshot has no pretense or ambition. Innocence is the quintessence of the snapshot. I wish to distinguish between innocence and ignorance. Innocence is one of the highest forms of being and ignorance is one of the lowest.
I set a discipline for myself to return every afternoon and take photographs like Edward Weston: f22, full sun, big set squares, big circles. I would smoke a joint with some hippies on the grass, then go do some more pictures.
Take pictures all the time. Don't worry if you take a bad photograph; you learn more by taking a bad picture than a good one. If you don't like it, study it and figure out why you don't like it. You'll learn from your mistake.
My work is aimed at creating a world in which I wish to live. Consequently, it is about creating ideals with the aid of realistic techniques. My most fundamental motivation is a desire for unity, fusion and sense of community.
Sometimes something is so frightening I must look at it this closely or dismiss it altogether. Sometimes it's so stunningly beautiful I feel completely left out. With either extreme, photographing makes me have to deal with it.
I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings.
I was 18 when I first visited London, I'm very provincial like that, but I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: This is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn't close.
It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.
It is an error common to many artists, who strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity.
My ethics are basically around animals. I cannot do animals in distress. I was able to shut myself off with humans, and in a strange way, if you go through violence, you come out stronger at the other end than what you went in.
If you must have a rule to follow, I would suggest cultivating a dialogue with your inner voice... If you listen to the clues your own images offer, the resulting work will be fresh, and authentic. Fall in love with your world.
A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don’t know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population.
A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don't know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population.
Digital technology has thrown a closed shop wide open, and there are more people out there snapping away than ever before. Some of the pictures are bad, some of them are good, and many of them need some seasoning and direction.
I have no real training in the history of fine art or furniture; my eye just works by proportions. I react intuitively. In London, it's all about color because the weather is so gray, and in that cold light they look beautiful.
If I'm in an unusual or extreme social environment, I always want to know what it's like to grow up there and experience it as normal, everyday life. And I want to know what sort of adults these children are going to turn into.
Your inspiration is better if it comes from many different sources and your sensibilities will transform all those influences and inspiration into your own visual world. It's like reading the book instead of watching the movie.
Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.
You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.
It doesn't matter where you are in your own personal development, nor has it mattered where you have been culturally; dogs simply don't pass judgment on you the way all of the rest of life and all your other companions seem to.
My dad was in the Korean War. He got shot seven times. He had seven bullet holes in him. And out of his troop of 35 guys, he was one of nine guys that came back. And when he came back from that he had seven kids in seven years.
What makes you push the shutter has to do with seeking a kind of perfection, a harmony in the world. You are instinctively aware it's there, but you've got to be completely alert and quick and so deeply awake that it moves you.
I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.
I have to understand the nature of change. And I cannot just work with stone or the more permanent materials. I need to work with leaves and ice and snow and mud and clay and water and the rising tide and the wind and all these.
I have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball.
The great rocks of Yosemite, expressing qualities of timeless yet intimate grandeur, are the most compelling formations of their kind. We should not casually pass them by, for they are the very heart of the earth speaking to us.
I think the fact that you have long - term relationships, this is a very unusual thing in the world, and I thought it was fantastic because you build up a trust. Each time you photograph the person, you try to do something else.
Today, free agency takes away a lot of your heroes, they go somewhere else. Some of them don't but a lot of them do-take the higher offer to go somewhere else. And, it turns the fans off because they get attached to the players.
Whenever you get a large body of work like 'Humans of New York,' a natural pathway becomes to put it between two covers. I wanted this to be a very nice keepsake. A lot of work went into it, and a lot of fans are attached to it.