David Hockney Quotes

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

I like being behind the camera because I can control perception and what people see.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

Those who by form did see me and those who followed me by voice. Wrong the efforts they engaged in, those people will not see me.

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

Photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you'd never paid attention to.

The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.

The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe.

When I look at pictures I have made, I have forgotten what I saw in front of the camera and respond only to what I am seeing in the photographs.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.

Art isn't about drawing; it's about learning to see. What organization doesn't need this ability?

Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size.

When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it.

Seeing well transforms mere existence into the art of living.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.

Seeing is a neglected enterprise.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

To see life. To see the world. To watch the faces of the poor, and the gestures of the proud. To see strange things. Machines, armies, multitudes, and shadows in the jungle. To see, and to take pleasure in seeing. To see and be instructed. To see and be amazed. (Describing the powers of photography; written for the launch of LIFE Magazine, 1936.)

[The Polaroid camera is] a system that will be a partner in perception, enabling us to see the objects in the world around us more vividly than we can see them without it, a system to be an aid to memory and a tool for exploration.

When I was studying at Chicago and at Stanford University, where many many cases of two people observing the same event have a different take on what happened.