Artistic Photography Quotes

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

Art is what we call...the thing an artist does. It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

Sometimes in life confusion tends to arise and only dialogue of dance seems to make sense.

All my images are self-portraits, even when I'm not in them.

Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.

Dance as the narration of a magical story; that recites on lips, illuminates imaginations and embraces the most sacred depths of souls.

If movements were a spark every dancer would desire to light up in flames.

Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.

If spirit is the seed, dance is the water of its evolution.

Dance is the timeless interpretation of life.

The very secret of life for me, I believed, was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility.

A camera is just a medium to capture what you have in your vision, and vision is something that cannot be bought.

If you opened the dictionary and searched for the meaning of a Goddess, you would find the reflection of a dancing lady.

Show me a person who found love in his life and did not celebrate it with a dance.

Don't breathe to survive; dance and feel alive.

Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourself and let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story. Let your very identity be your book. Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.

Life is an affair of mystery; shared with companions of music, dance and poetry.

Dance to inspire, dance to freedom, life is about experiences so dance and let yourself become free.

Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.

DANCE – Defeat All Negativity (via) Creative Expression.

The canvas is the door to another dimension. The paintbrush is the key.

She who is a dancer can only sway the silk of her hair like the summer breeze.

It's been said that the role of the artist is to teach us to see and that's true. However, the role of other artists is to teach me how they see. To learn how I see is somethig that cannot be taught but must be learned.

Dance is the ritual of immortality.

One step, two steps, three steps; like winds of time experience joy of centuries, when movements become revelations of the dance of destinies.

Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was "digitization" which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. "An aesthetic holocaust!

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.

The photographer does the world a great disservice when he leaves his camera at home.

if you have the tools but do not have the visual concept, the tools do not work

One of the benefits of being an artist is being very observant.

I have found my way, step by step, proceeding from touch points that have emerged, some through conscious choice and some through dream state discovery.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance and not breath.

Dance is that delicacy of life radiating every particle of our existence with happiness.

Not every artistic person should have to be a photographer, but every photographer should be artistic.

The artistic methods of poetry, painting, photography, and writing share certain commonalities of deep composition: spirit, rhythm, thought, and scenery.

We are thieves of the moment, taking every instance in appreciation of its true value.

Its not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns a camera. To be a photographer you must understand, appreciate and harness the power you hold!

Transcend the terrestrial; surpass the celestial, from nature’s hands when you receive the sublime pleasures of dance.

Smile, you are here.

We quickly became friends with other art faculty members such as the ceramist Jim Leedy and his wife Jean and art historian/artist Bill Kortlander and his wife Betty. I also began taking classes in Southeast Asian history with John Cady, who had resigned from his position at the U.S.[CB4] [mo5]  State Department because he thought it would be a huge mistake to get involved in a “land war in Southeast Asia.” In 1966, his warnings were starting to become all too obvious as the Vietnam war grew and protests against it emerged. Dr. Cady was in the thick of the protests and was even being shadowed by the F.B.I. After I finished my BFA in art in 1966, I began work on a master’s degree in history at Dr. Cady’s urging. He and his wife became frequent guests at our parties

Guys don't understand great art. They don't care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer to record emotion that only the heart can see. They're threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was pissed when I brought my Nikon to the prom, but I'd missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base.

A famous artist is approached by a student. "You don't remember me," the student says correctly, "but years ago you said something that changed my life. You said, 'Photography is death.' After that," says the student, "I threw out my camera. I began again. I want to thank you for changing my life." "Leave me alone," says the artist. "Photography is life.

Art is unpredictable.

When a dancer performs, melody transforms into a carriage, expressions turn into fuel and spirit experiences a journey to a world where passion attains fulfillment.

Give love as if you were being paid millions to do so. That is the key to lasting change.

Many times someone giving you advice is just trying to convince themselves of said advice, this is my advice to you and me." - Vic Stah Milien

Photography saved my life by opening my eyes to the beauty that surrounds me each and everyday. Life look much richer from behind the lens.

You don't need balance if you build the life of your dreams because it is built around everything you enjoy doing and with everyone you love doing it with.

A boy in the schoolyard handing out the very same love-letter to a bunch of girls. This is what I think of ‘limited editions’ in art photography.

art is risk made visible

When your heart jumps every time your camera locks focus...You've become a photographer.

There's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.

The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass themselves off - or pimp themselves out - as art. The simple truth is that the best exponents of the art of contemporary photography continue to produce work that fits broadly within the tradition of what Evans termed 'documentary style'.

The moon occurs more frequently than the sun as an image in lyric poetry. There is a greater contrast between the moon and the night sky than there is between the sun and the daytime sky. And this contrast is more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself, than it is to happiness, which always joins or blends. And to stand face-to-face with the sun is preposterous -- it would blind you. The moon has no light of its own; our apprehension of it is but a reflection of the sun. And some believe artists reflect the creative powers of some original impulse too great to name. The moon is the incunabulum of photography, the first photograph, the first stilled moment, the first study in contrasts. Me here -- you there. Between 1969 and 1972, six missions left for the moon and six missions came back. The men who went to the moon who were forever altered without exception all say the same thing -- it was not being on the moon that profoundly affected them as much as it was looking at the earth from the vantage point of the moon. You there -- me here.

The photographer does the world a great disservice when she leaves her camera at home.

An art prodigy of the 21st century has yet to be crowned. Or have they?

This is almost always the case: A piece of art receives its f(r)ame when found offensive.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance like breath.

Make dance the mission every moment seeks to accomplish.

That, really, was Sandy’s choice: Tommy’s naked ass or Steven Spielberg’s director of photography.

Spirit is a child, the tune of dancing feet its lullaby.

Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie.

discovered is that I’m an image maker, and I don’t care how its made—whether it’s through painting or photography or drawing—I just want to create images.

I learned to cook by helping my mother in the kitchen. I assisted her with the canning, and she began assigning me some other tasks like making salad dressing or kneading dough for bread. My first attempt at preparing an entire dinner¾the menu included pork chops Hawaiian, which called for the pork to be marinated in papaya nectar, ginger, cumin, and other spices before being grilled with onions and pineapple cubes¾required an extensive array of exotic ingredients. When he saw my grocery list, my father commented, “I hope she marries a rich man.

I asked Bill what career path he thought I should take, and he replied, “Live the artist’s life.” For years I pondered over his advice. What did it mean to “live the artist’s life?” I finally came to realize that there were no written codes, no hard and fast rules. You didn’t have to starve in a garret or drink yourself to death or cut off your ear. You didn’t even have to literally “make art” physically. The art was your life—your values, your outlook, your passions, your point of view. It was the things you cherished, whether they were people or places or ideas.

Living the artist’s life, it turns out, is full of surprises. Yes, it is about being sensitive to beauty, about creating exquisite objects and developing a critical eye and drawing inspiration from the rich tapestry of the surrounding world. In some intriguing and evocative way, it is also about delving into the very depths of human perception, into the wellspring of consciousness itself, and living to tell about it. And for John and me, it has also always been about the planning, preparation, and enjoyment of good food. Sixty years later, we’re still following that path.

I was gifted valuable advice from weathered men about their hard-learned lessons on the road to success but I was young and arrogant. I set out to learn everything the hard way. It’s made me realize that I’m too stubborn to reach my true potential but grateful to have become aware of this limitation.

Trauma and pain are the foundations of art. I believe that. When tragedy strikes, however, a muralist or a watercolorist has the opportunity to be a human being in the moment and an artist afterward. Faced with the death of a loved one, a sculptor or portraitist can first grieve, suffer, and heal--then create. Most artists go through life this way. They can react normally to the trials and tribulations of the human experience. They can pass through the world with compassion and comradeship. They can make their art later. Outside, elsewhere, beyond. But photography is immediate. It does not offer the luxury of time. Faced with blood, death, or transformation, a photographer has no choice but to reach for the camera. An artist first, a human being afterward. Photography is a neutral record of all events, a chronicle of things both sublime and terrible. By necessity, this work is made without emotion, without connection, without love.

The weak are always going to be under the control of the powerful. It is this way in all of nature. Intelligence is knowing where you stand in this truth and finding a way into the powerful group without anyone noticing you're doing so.

An artist’s job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master—be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography.

Photography turns one and all into fools, including—especially—artists like himself, eager to hunt life and trap as many of its fleeting variables as possible inside a 35 mm frame but doomed to return empty-handed far more often than not.

She noticed the lemony yellow light in her dream and heard nothing of her alarm clock so continued to dream and dreamt of Jamestown and the sound of the foghorns over the water and the gulls and every night that was the breath of the day before.

Elisa Pierandrei's 'Painting, Photography, Drawing. From Africa and Its Diaspora (selected writings)' is a book that pays equal attention to aesthetics, process, medium and the artist as a human in the world (and not only an artist from 'Africa’)

Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I'm struck by how much they see and how much they know--and how much I don't. Good art writing should therefore do at least two things. It should teach us how to look: at art, architecture, sculpture, photography and all the other visual components of our daily landscape. And it should give us the information we need to understand what we're looking at.

We may never know what another person is thinking--never truly get into anyone else's head--but photography brings us as close as anything can. When the members of an audience at an art gallery look at a picture, they can step for a moment inside the mind of the artist. Like telepathy. Like time travel. At some future date, when people gaze at my photographs of the islands, they will see what I saw. They will stand where I stood, on this granite, surrounded by this ocean. Perhaps they will even feel some of the elation I have experienced here.

I am intrigued with scriptural mythology that tells us that God created a divine feminine presence to dwell amongst humanity. This concept has had a constant influence on the work. I have imagined her as ubiquitous, watchful, and often in motion. This work is, in effect, the photographic image of the invisible.

Photography wasn’t even considered part of the art world until fairly recently. I find it ironic that some people in the world of fine-art photography consider digital photography as somehow “less artistic,” when it is merely a change in process, not vision. The debates will always be there, but your vision is yours alone.

To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor…. Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth" (Minor White, Newhall, 281).

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

Limit not to only five, when the divine gifts the supreme sixth; the sense of dance

I look for ambiguity because life is ambiguous!

It has long struck me that people who attempt creative work of any type—scientific, artistic, or otherwise—without feeling any enthusiasm for that work have no chance at success.

Photography is not only an art, it is an international language that everybody understands.

In addition to this artistic photography, white people have also started to take pictures of their food before they eat it. Some white people do this as a spiritual tribute to the food they are about to eat, but most white people do it so that they can post to Facebook or Twitter and prove to their friends that they ate from a cool food truck before it became too popular.

At different times I've worked in different mediums. For me, the variation is not an artistic judgment, but a necessary choice. It's just as normal to eat with chopsticks, as it is to eat with forks or hands. Different circumstances call for different tools. I try to express ideas with the most appropriate available materials and forms. Very often the medium comes first, and then my reasons for it. Sometimes, I work with a medium I don't like out of curiosity. It is an experiment to challenge my pre-existing concepts and tastes. I've taken hundreds and thousands of photographs, and it's not because I like the medium. I wanted something to parallel my daily activities, and photography is the most logical way of doing that. I filmed documentaries because the medium reflects real conditions the most completely. I don't think artists should only work with what is handiest and most familiar, because the unfamiliar provides a challenge, and it creates another language. It defines the condition for new possibilities.

Audience of angels descend in the ambiance reciting praises in your glory, when you wear your dance shoes, when you arrive at the stage and with every step you take beneath your feet heaven moves. That is the power of dance.

When we separate our artistic activity from daily life, we cut ourselves off from our most valuable creative resource. However, if we live life as an art form in itself, we have available to us all that we experience and see.

The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.

Artist communities love to bullshit each other and glad-hand one another, and there's no room for the crippling honesty of comedy. "I'm a painter" -- well... you don't...probably need to do that. . . . if you're painting something that doesn't exist, I understand that, I can appreciate- . . . but if your pain- 'oh, it's a barnyard scene in autumn'--well then just take a picture of a barn in autumn! It's way better than a painting! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]

Some feminist artists have chosen a fundamentally sexual or erotic imagery... Others have opted for a realist or conceptual celebration of female experience in which birth, motherhood, rape, maintenance, household imagery, windows, menstruation, autobiography, family background and portraits of friends figure prominently...

In the first place, I think there's going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific. And I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? Already some of the very beautiful color photography appears in whiskey ads, I notice. Science will also discover for us how association blocks actually form.

you travel to lush looted countries. parts of earth laying on their sides. barely breathing. hot with rust, infection, and tourist anemia. you and your camera arrive. start tearing at bodies with your lust. it’s harmless. appreciating culture. sharing. honoring clothing. the way certain skin exists oh you've sold those photographs the ones you were so excited about. the ones you 'caught' with children being children. the one with the woman you thought so 'beautiful'. you and your camera eat as much as one stomach and three sd cards can hold. get on a plane and leave with the belief that your eyes are ckean. honest. artistic. - photography | the gaze

Frederick Douglass, an early convert, became a theorist of photography. “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists,” he said. “It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features.” But a photograph was no caricature. Douglass therefore sat, again and again, in a portraitist’s studio: he became the most photographed man in nineteenth-century America, his likeness taken more often than Twain or even Lincoln.

Behind every selfportrait, There's an idea I want to convey, A pose, a concept, a quote; I want to inteprete. But most often than not : this is not about me. It's about curves, It's about light, It's about motion, And emotions. At a certain period, When artists wanted to represent themselves, They had to sit and paint, And lie and wait. For hours. And during those times they spent, In layers and layers of colours, They had to have this whole introspection process... It's got to be. Because it's about expressing something that comes from within. It's about sharing a part of ourselves; A part we'd rather keep secret.

Cinematographer.” Such an ornate term, yet still so vague. I often wonder if that’s to blame for how overlooked we are as a profession. Or even worse, that dry title, “Director of Photography.” But we are the true artists. A director may quite literally call the shots, but it is the cinematographer that makes them. We choose the angles, the lighting, pretty much everything that you see on the screen. The camera is a brush, and we are the hand, the arm, the eye. The director’s basically just the mouth, making pointless noise while the hand does the actual work. Almost every famous director that you know who has a distinctive visual style has simply managed to lock down a talented DoP.

Now give me some advice about how to take full advantage of this city. I’m always looking to improve my odds.” “Just what I’d expect from a horny actuary.” “I’m serious.” Carlos reflected for a moment on the problem at hand. He actually had never needed or tried to take full advantage of the city in order to meet women, but he thought about all of his friends who regularly did. His face lit up as he thought of some helpful advice: “Get into the arts.” “The arts?” “Yeah.” “But I’m not artistic.” “It doesn’t matter. Many women are into the arts. Theater. Painting. Dance. They love that stuff.” “You want me to get into dance? Earthquakes have better rhythm than me…And can you really picture me in those tights?” “Take an art history class. Learn photography. Get involved in a play or an independent film production. Get artsy, Sammy. I’m telling you, the senoritas dig that stuff.” “Really?” “Yeah. You need to sign up for a bunch of artistic activities. But you can’t let on that it’s all just a pretext to meet women. You have to take a real interest in the subject or they’ll quickly sniff out your game.” “I don’t know…It’s all so foreign to me…I don’t know the first thing about being artistic.” “Heeb, this is the time to expand your horizons. And you’re in the perfect city to do it. New York is all about reinventing yourself. Get out of your comfort zones. Become more of a Renaissance man. That’s much more interesting to women.

This photo is classic aestheticism. The engaging expression, the loose dress and fluid posture. Early to mid-1860's, if I had to guess." "It reminded me of the Pre-Raphaelites." "Related, definitely; and of course the artists of the time were all inspired by one another. They obsessed over things like nature and truth; color, composition, and the meaning of beauty. But where the Pre-Raphaelites strove for realism and detail, the painters and photographers of the Magenta Brotherhood were devoted to sensuality and motion." "There's something moving about the quality of light, don't you think?" "The photographer would be thrilled to hear you say so. Light was of principal concern to them: they took their name from Goethe's color wheel theories, the interplay of light and dark, the idea that there was a hidden color in the spectrum, between red and violet, that closed the circle. You have to remember, it was right in the middle of a period when science and art were exploding in all directions. Photographers were able to use technology in ways they hadn't before, to manipulate light and experiment with exposure times to create completely new effects.

This is why, where art is concerned, the most interesting thing would be to infiltrate the spongiform encephalon of the modern spectator, For this is where the mystery lies today: in the brain of the receiver, at the nerve centre of this servility before 'works of art'. What is the secret of it? In the complicity between the mortification 'creative artists' inflict on objects and themselves, and the mortification consumers inflict on themselves and their mental faculties. Tolerance for the worst of things has clearly increased considerably as a function of this general state of complicity. Interface and performance - these are the two current leitmotifs. In performance, all the forms of expression merge - the plastic arts, photography, video, installation, the interactive screen. This vertical and horizontal, aesthetic and commercial diversification is henceforth part of the work, the original core of which cannot be located. A (non-) event like The Matrix illustrates this perfectly: this is the very archetype of the global installation, of the total global fact: not just the film, which is, in a way, the alibi, but the spin-offs, the simultaneous projection at all points of the globe and the millions of spectators themselves who are inextricably part of it. We are all, from a global, interactive point of view, the actors in this total global fact.