Walker Evans Quotes

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

I wanted all my life to give my world into other arts - books, plays, movies - but I didn't want to sell out.

Making television is difficult. Making any art is difficult.

If people respect us as artists, they know we'll give them something different every time; they know we're pushing ourselves.

I think it's harder to make a classic now, not because of what people say, but because artists now are so concerned with what people say.

It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.

The precision of hisskill places his work beyond the tentative and the experimental stage. He is continually searching and exploring both himself and his surroundings. and in this exploration of the realm of places, people and things, contrasts and relationships, Callahan is no respecter of conventional technical formula or code. His delicate sense of pattern is an integral part of his photography and not a thing by itself.

Going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.

I'm going to work with Dan Clowes. After Charlie Kaufman, it's hard to fill up the gap. It's hard to find somebody who... A lot of writers, I can clearly see the desire of succeeding before the desire of expressing themselves. Sometimes people get upset when you want to be different. You were talking about "whimsical," which is a nice word. But sometimes they use the word "quirky" in the pejorative sense. I get frustrated, because they feel like I'm doing whatever I want, and there is no ground, and I don't really care. They feel it's cynical. But I don't think I have any cynicism in me.

When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with yoiu - your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.

Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.

I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight... I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

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.

It always amazes me that just when I think there's nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and as moving and as formally interesting as any other medium.

All photography is Pop, and all photographers are crazy... they feel guilty since they don't have to do very much - just push a button.

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

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.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.