photography

It's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it's also true that a word is worth a thousand pictures.

All portraits reveal both the the painter and the person painted. In many ways all paintings are self-portraits. All part of why art informs.

Artist communities love to bullshit each other and glad-hand one another, and there's no room for the crippling honesty of comedy."I'm a painter" -- well... you don't...probably need to do that.. . . if you're painting something that doesn't exist, I understand that, I can appreciate- . . . but if your pain- 'oh, it's a barnyard scene in autumn'--well then just take a picture of a barn in autumn! It's way better than a painting! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]

Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love.

Photography is like stealing.You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character,their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that,who find that terrifying.The thought that everyone,friend of foe,can get so close to you,look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond.A part of them has become the property of the photographer.

Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.

Don't we all know that art is dangerous. You play it - then you live it.

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.

Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.

Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.

The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.

It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man__ face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building__nd then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It__ the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.

One thing that struck me early is that you don__ put into a photograph what__ going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.