Howard S. Becker famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that 'language' themselves just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs. Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way.
-- Howard S. Becker

#Musical #Cameras #Musician
Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem.
-- Howard S. Becker

#Hands #Giving #Details
Every part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total statement; the viewer's responsibility is to see, in the most literal way, everything that is there and respond to it. To put it another way, the statement the image makes - not just what it show you, but the mood, moral evaluation and casual connections it suggest - is built up from those details. A proper 'reading' of a photograph sees and responds to them consciously.
-- Howard S. Becker

#Reading #Responsibility #Connections

The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engineâ€¦ Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his lifes work.
I have always made commercial music. The people who vote for the Grammy nominees are mostly in their 40s and have other jobs or are musicians themselves. They like music that they can relate to - they like commercial music.
I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.
Pablo Casals is a great musician in all he does: a cellist without equal, and extraordinary conductor and composer with something to say. I have been profoundly impressed by all I have heard of his work, but he is a musician of this stature because he is also a great man.
One day, a musician asked me what I did. When I told him I was to be a businessman, he laughed and said, You are not a businessman. Sometimes all it takes is one person to put an important thought in your head, and he did.
I'm a compulsive musician, but it's also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.
I personally feel that acting is not totally different from singing and being a musician.
I know my own weaknesses as a human being, and as a musician, as a singer and as a woman.

Howard S. Becker famous quotes

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