Larry Sultan famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I'm very interested in making the photographs look real, but a lot of them are highly synthetic. They're hybrids, located somewhere between the found and the constructed.
-- Larry Sultan

#Real #Looks #Photograph
Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, 'Isn't this a great family?' So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology.
-- Larry Sultan

#Photography #Vacation #Ideas
Ambiguity is really important to me. Part of the difficulty facing photographers is that almost any subject matter has accumulated a representational history, so to find a new discursive space, a space to wander around those subject matters, is a real challenge.
-- Larry Sultan

#Real #Space #Challenges
Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography - to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging.... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.
-- Larry Sultan

#Photography #Reality #Thinking
Like a ventriloquist who laughs at his dummy's jokes, I keep trying to make photographs that seduce me into believing in the image - all the time knowing better, but believing anyway.
-- Larry Sultan

#Believe #Knowing Better #Laughing
What's important to me is that [photographs] have the appearance of being documents of what goes on. I like the illusion of veracity, that they look like life rather than movie stills. I don't want them to look fabricated.
-- Larry Sultan

#Important #Looks #Goes On
...when it comes down to making work that really sings, I don't know if I can teach any of it. I don't even know if I can do any of it half the time. It's so much about failure, it's so much about making pictures that are so utterly boring and overstated, you're endlessly disappointed. And in that process you hopefully find something that draws you back and calls to you.
-- Larry Sultan

#Half #Boring #Process
I love making pictures, even if most of the results are lousy.
-- Larry Sultan

#Love Making #Results #Ifs
...I think finding that room to make pictures that don't jump off the wall as, or detonate as dramatic, either in lighting or in form or in composition or in subject matter, but more ordinary, that's the challenge.
-- Larry Sultan

#Wall #Thinking #Challenges

Subtle, funny and touching, with a striking downbeat authenticity. Director Craig Zobel is the real thing.
Of course, the advantage is that, being in this business, you get to learn a lot, experience a lot of new things, and you can become real successful. The disadvantage is, of course the negative media. People may try to manipulate you and control you, and those are the things you have to avoid. But if you maintain strong family values and you believe in God, you can be successful. So, it's been tough, but I've gotten through it because I stuck with my family and my deep belief in God.
Well, I think that the image is a part of me. I wear the baggy pants, the hats, the whole nine. And you know, I may add a little for the excitement and the intrigue in the videos, but my family has told me that little air of mystery that surrounds me is for real.
A visual understanding of great composition and how to use a camera and expensive lenses can be learned, but drive and a real hunger for making photos and telling stories... I don't think that part can be learned. You either have that inside, or you don't.
Reality is like a fruitcake; pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface.
I got as much information as I could, so I wouldn't look stupid, but this is a post 9/11 world and there's only so much you can do with the FBI in terms of research.
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.
Patience is the essence of clicking great Photographs!!
In a photograph a personâ€™s eyes tell much, sometimes they tell all.
Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph

Larry Sultan famous quotes

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