Gerard Malanga Quotes

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.

Taking photos is a form of collecting.

I've always tried to do pictures that don't date.

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

Visual presentation of our heritage in glass is needed.

Over the years, my 'Door' paintings have become somewhat mythologized.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

I wanted to make pictures where you would not know who took them. I also bring the present into the past.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

I don't want my music to be of its time; I want it to be timeless.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

I want to make work that reflects different times and processes.

Blest be the art that can immortalize.

I want to be remembered much more by a total vision than a few perfect single pictures.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that's the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was so ordinary. Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it's called documentary, which I suppose is all right ... We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.