David Hockney Quotes

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

Photographs are interpretations of reality; as such, it is entirely subjective. Most photos are taken with an agenda, to sell something or to make a subject look better than it really is. Think of family snapshots - everyone is smiling and happy.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

I've always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us. Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.

Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leave the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which then becomes an impenetrable enigma.

Women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too.

It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.

The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.