Ruth Bernhard Quotes

I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.

Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.

Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's in your own life, hopefully, is exactly that. Friendship and love and passion for movies and cartoons and comic books, whatever it is that you love. Most of the way we live our lives involves looking for pleasure and beauty and happiness and affection. Real artists don't use reflexive clichés about things. It's about honoring the reality of people's lives, which defies conventions and clichés and expectations. People are interesting, period.

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.

The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.

I think there's more real in the unreal than there is in the real.

Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself - like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.

For me, a picture should be like sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem. It must have radiance; it must be like those stones which Pyrenean shepherds use to light their pipes.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.