Stacy Schiff Quotes

It is impossible for human beings not to view something subjectively.

We are artists. We are all subjective people; we have a point of view. It doesn't mean we are right.

Bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Facts are your firewall against bias.

Pictures... are also opinions... [they] set down what the camera operator sees and he sees what he wants to see and what he loves and hates and pities and is proud of.

No, I don't think you're ever an objective observer. By making a frame you're being selective, then you edit the pictures you want published and you're being selective again. You develop a point of view that you want to express. You try to go into a situation with an open mind, but then you form an opinion, and you express it in your photographs.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact.

The world is how we see the world. Some people see the world good, the other people see the world bad. Every person has an idea of the world with a subjective [viewpoint].

I do not document anything, I give an interpretation.

My job is to say, 'This is how I see the world. Do you agree?'

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

The notion that any one person can describe 'what really happened' is an absurdity. If ten - or a hundred - people witness an event, there will be ten - or a hundred - different versions of what took place. What we see and how we interpret it depends entirely upon our individual past experience.

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.

We all have one idea of what the color blue is, but pressed to describe it specifically, there are so many ways: the ocean, lapis lazuli, the sky, someone's eyes. Our definitions are as different as we are ourselves.

Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.

I think everyone spins. You would just be an empty vacant shell reporting facts. I mean, you have your life that you bring with you to every moment that happens.

Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

There is no such thing as an objective interpretation.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.

I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing.

Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

It is the heart that makes the critic, not the nose.