Glenn Ligon Quotes

I'm always worried about the sitter - are they cold, are they hot, are they comfortable? Photography today is so accurate and so good that it's really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.

Digital imaging is as much about chemistry as it is about semiconductors.

The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth. It's taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you're throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

I have my misgivings about 3-D. I don't like the lack of blacks and whites, how it dulls the image, how the color gets corrupted. I don't necessarily like the experience of having heavy glasses in front of me.

I've learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures.

Every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It's just converted into a different form.

I'm not a photographer, so I need all the help I can get when it comes to make a picture look cool.

Do you know, that is the root of the whole trouble - has been one of the roots at any rate - is people hearing things and then imagining some more and magnifying it and multiplying it.

I just love the look of film. But I have nothing against HD.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.

Film is better than digital in every way. It has better contrast ratio, better blacks, and better color reproduction. It's a more organic image, which is more the way your eyes see.

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

Somehow Photoshop and the ease with which one can produce an image has degraded the quality of photography in general.

Digital technology has thrown a closed shop wide open, and there are more people out there snapping away than ever before. Some of the pictures are bad, some of them are good, and many of them need some seasoning and direction.

The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.

Well, I think the camera freedom is something that we've resisted for a long time and feels like probably the biggest stretch. But it has some huge benefits.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion.

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away.

The less the camera is able to capture what you're seeing in a scene, the more editing it needs.

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but I think if the picture is made in MS Paint, the going rate might be slightly less.

Digital photography makes you a better photographer.

I think most of our eyes are trained to background being completely out of focus, but you can't do that with an iPhone unless you manipulate it quite a lot in post. You have to accept the fact that your film is going to look a little different on the big screen. Even though the resolution holds up, it does have something very different about it.