Alison Jackson Quotes

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

I think when I'm drawing, I'm seeing what's happening on the page almost as if it were unfolding like a movie in my head.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

I have a visual imagination.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

I don't think in words; I think in pictures, in images.

I have trouble writing if I can't picture how things are going to look.

The two sensibilities, the visual and the verbal, have always been linked for me - in fact, while reading a particularly evocative passage, I will imagine what the photograph I'd take of that scene would look like, even with burning and dodging notes. Maybe everyone does this.

When I read something, I picture that scene in that detail. That becomes very similar to composing a photo in real life.

When I was 5 years old, I saw people dancing in my head. In college, I would choreograph for the cultural shows, and in my notes, I would actually create formations of people. It was how my whole brain worked.

I'm a hypervisual person.

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

The truth is, I don't sketch much at all. I have a very visual/spatial brain that retains a lot of information about maps, directions, positioning, and details, so I usually prefer working out those issues on the page itself.

I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

And that desire-the strong desire to take pictures-is important. It borders on a need, based on a habit: the habit of seeing. Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. It is the hope that we might express ourselves fully-and the evidence that other photographers have done so-that keep us taking pictures.

I can picture things, like a painter would, though Im not good at painting, either.

I like visual imagery in my head.

If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.

Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.)

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

I enjoyed learning something and, uh, so I think like with anything in life, in the schoolroom in an artistic endeavor, if you have just a really good teacher, it's inspiring. I certainly use, in my work, I mean, I used to rely heavily on imagery. I was obsessed with this photograph that was in the NY Times of a fish engulfing a smaller fish and this smaller fish had this look in its eyes; it knew what was about to happen and, I don't know how they ever captured such an image, but I've used that for a play I (did). It's called "Saved."

I don't know. I don't go around looking at my pictures. I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures. When the time comes, for whatever reason, I get involved in editing and getting some prints made and stuff. There are things that interest me. But I don't really mull over them a lot.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.