All WALKER EVANS Quotes about “Photography”

“The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.”
“Incidentally, part of a photographerâ€™s gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what youâ€™re doing and feel all right about it, and you can do terrible work if you put them on the defense, which they all are at the beginning. Youâ€™ve got to take them off their defensive attitude and make them participate.”
“With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.”
“It's too presumptuous and naÃ¯ve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else... I equate that with propaganda; I think that's a lower rank of purpose.”
“The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.”
“Somewhere in our search for reality we have passed something by, something important that we no longer find amid the bits and pieces of disassembled matter-something vital that we cannot build out of these parts. There is surely something else, some piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and that owes no homage to the sun.”
“... nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'”
“Privilege, if you're very strict, is an immoral and unjust thing to have, but if you've got it you didn't choose to get it and you might as well use it. You're privileged to be at Yale, but you know you're under an obligation to repay what's been put into you.”
“I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.”
“Detachment, lack of sentimentality, originality, a lot of things that sound rather empty. I know what they mean. Let's say, "visual impact" may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though. I mean it's a quality that something has or does not have. Coherence. Well, some things are weak, some things are strong.”
“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.”
“It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.”
“It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.”
“I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn't need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.”
“Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.”
“I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.”
“I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another.”
“Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.”
“Good photography is unpretentious.”

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