William Mortensen famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Photography, like any other art, is a form of communication. The artist is not blowing bubbles for his own gratification, but is speaking a language, is telling somebody something.
-- William Mortensen

#Photography #Art #Communication
Emotion may be expressed, or the utter lack of it may be expressed, but the only important fact is that of expression.
-- William Mortensen

#Expression #Important #May
If tone is granted to be subjected to control, why not line also, which has equal emotional significance? And if line, why not shapes and forms? And if shapes and forms, why not allow elision or emphasis of detail? And if all these things are allowed, what becomes of the record of actuality ?... Sunk without a trace!
-- William Mortensen

#Emotional #Details #Why Not
Nature is an unpleasing, stupid, lumpy, blowsy wench.
-- William Mortensen

#Stupid #Wenches
Thoughts and emotions cannot be photographed, despite the protestations of some mystically minded portraitists. Physical fact is ultimately the sole pictorial material.
-- William Mortensen

#Facts #Emotion #Sole

Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.
Photography has the power to undo your assumptions about the world.
As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.
In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.
What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction.
Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
The obedient in art are always the forgotten . . . The country is glorious but its beauties are unknown, and but waiting for a real live artist to splash them onto canvas . . . Chop your own path. Get off the car track.
Art, however innocent, looks like deceiving.
Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

William Mortensen famous quotes

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