Gail Levin famous quotes

Not only did she [Marilyn Monroe] master her own image, create it and ultimately control it, she was the subject of many of the great masters of photography of the 20th century.
-- Gail Levin

#Photography #Century #Masters

She [Marilyn Monroe] wasn't the most incredibly beautiful. She's rather ordinary. Cute, but no Rita Hayworth. I think she was ready for the camera, and it was a real destiny for her.
-- Gail Levin

#Cute #Beautiful #Real

I don't think she [Marilyn Monroe] saw herself as victimized and a sex object. She knew how to contend with it. I'm sure she was no fool about it. On the one hand, it was very flattering and great; on the other hand, it was probably awful and could be very lascivious and very terrible. But I think a lot of women just wanted to be like her. And that's still true today.
-- Gail Levin

#Sex #Thinking #Hands

For me, the arts are just an endless source of intelligence, brilliance, imagination, and originality.
-- Gail Levin

#Art #Imagination #Originality

I think the beauty of documentary work is that it's a mystery - you never know where it's going to lead you. You start out with some notion of it, but it's very different from a script. A script you write, you shoot against, and you know what the story is going to be. There's always the element of surprise, but the surprise comes from performance, from something that's improvised, it comes from someone who sees it inside an already determined framework. In documentary, it's never determined. It's never the same, and affords enormous possibility.
-- Gail Levin

#Writing #Thinking #Different

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.

Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.

To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

The only nature I'm interested in is my own nature.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).

We need to invest in peoples lives so that they can do the jobs of the 21st century.

If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.

To mention only contemporaries, Delacroix, Corot, Millet, Rousseau, Courbet are masters. And finally [I like] all those [painters] who loved and had a strong feeling for nature.

It is a great mistake, as we have already remarked, to be afraid of Him and to act in His presence like a timid and craven slave trembling with fright before his master.