John Divola famous quotes

To photograph is often compared to an act of redemption - to select from an infinite number of choices that which is to be remembered.
-- John Divola

#Numbers #Choices #Redemption

The photograph as an object has a relationship to that which it represents something like the relationship the snake skin has to the snake that sheds it.
-- John Divola

#Snakes #Skins #Photograph

I don't look for things to see how they function as metaphors.... You can't photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.
-- John Divola

#Sublime #Looks #Metaphor

In all my work there's this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can't make the sublime itself.
-- John Divola

#Sublime #Photograph #Notion

It's good to be around people who see [photography] as a reasonable enterprise when everyone in the neighborhood may think it's ridiculous. (On the benefit of teaching photography)
-- John Divola

#Photography #Teaching #Thinking

I really don't worry too much about what I see through the viewfinder, at least not at that point, especially if I'm using a flash because I don't know what it's going to do. I just see vague potentiality. It's really working with a set of attributes that will hopefully interact in an interesting way.
-- John Divola

#Interesting #Worry #Too Much

With the first step, the number of shapes the walk might take is infinite, but then the walk begins to define itself as it goes along, though freedom remains total with each step: any tempting side road can be turned into an impulse, or any wild patch of woods can be explored. The pattern of the walk is to come true, is to be recognized, discovered.

The search which takes place in my studio might best be described as a mining operation, a vertical dig in which a number of discoveries are apt to surface from a single shaft.

Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.

Making a movie is, for me, like painting. I just enjoy the care that goes into every brushstroke and the choice of every color. I enjoy the intensity of it.

You must believe before everything else that the revolution must come, that there is no other choice,

Every time we interact with another person at work, we have a choice to make: do we try to claim as much value as we can, or contribute value without worrying about what we receive in return?

REDEMPTION, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin, through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned . . . . whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it.

Usually redemption implies rescue - being saved. What were you being saved from?' he inquired, his voice carefully neutral. 'Ugliness.

Forgetfulness leads to exile while remembrance is the secret of redemption.

You cannot amputate your history from your destiny, because that is redemption.