Jacob Riis Quotes

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

Art is all about the experience. I could say I don't really relate to opera, but then you watch Placido Domingo, and you go, 'Blimey, look at that.'

Things develop in front of my camera, and then I will try to do the best out of it. I am close, but in most of the scenes, I am trying not to be seen. I think that's the trick. I think it starts in your heart, goes to the head, and the head puts it into the finger.

I want people to come see my films and enjoy them but at the end of the day you can't control what people think.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

The songs are about things that we were thinking and we wrote 'em down, and when you listen to 'em, whatever you think it's about... THAT'S what it's about!

Literally, FX is like, 'How can we foster your vision?' My vision is pretty much taking pictures of the way I see my life.

I hate it when people try to explain music. The best thing about music is that it's invisible. If you make a song and someone is like, 'Explain it,' and you explain the message, it's like - poof. It all crashes down.

Nothing can ever be wrong about music.

I just see potential in things that aren't there and how it's going to make you feel. Like, if it makes me feel a certain way, I try and create the vibe of how that felt to me. And try and create it for someone else.

I'm really taken by the fact that my photographs live on somebody's wall.

Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel.

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

I just try to find targets I feel something about and express it my way.

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

The movie on the screen is always going to be different from the movie in your head. How it makes you feel is what I'm after, what I'm chasing, and what I'm trying to construct.

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

Music is an experience, not a science.

It’s not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter.

I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.

I don't want to tell what the songs are about for me, because then people can't decide for themselves, which is why I write; it's for you to find your own meaning in. For me it's my story, for someone else it's theirs; if I tell exactly what it means, then it's only my story.

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.