Paul Strand Quotes

If you're not observing the world around you, in some sense you're not really an artist because then that means you're just replicating other people's stuff, or, I don't even know what you're doing.

Photography is nothing-it's life that interests me.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, 'I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.' He knew how insidious other people's ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.

Imitation always stinks. When I take photos, I don't go back. I don't look at the past. I'm always original.

When I’m photographing I see life.

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.

In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.

Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary.

If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint... I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything... and then make something... Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it... Nothing is important... so everything is important.

You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

There is no intellectual or emotional substitute for the authentic, the original, the unique masterpiece.

I don't think anybody came into the movie business to be unoriginal and plagiarising and not having an original idea in their brain.

You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

People will come up to me at shows and tell me that a song touched them in a completely different way than I wrote it. That's fun. Fans translating it in their own way.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

I realized that I could try to sound like Waylon Jennings, or I could try to be like Waylon Jennings... but it's impossible to do both.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.