Olafur Eliasson Quotes

Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.

I am a man of very many anxieties but doing strange things with the camera is not one of them.

In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.

Unfortunately, there was no Jackson Pollock of the camera.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

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.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

A sketch will not serve more than one state of mind & will not serve to drink at again & again — in a sketch there is nothing but the one state of mind — that which you were in at the time.

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.

I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape - see a pretty place and try to paint it - but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.

When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see...And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are...that's the world, isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth.

Everyone started to have a camera. That's when I started to travel outside of New York and go into nature.

Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there. and everything else fell away.

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

There is no photograph more inherently photographic than another.

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera.

When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.

For instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully.