John Baldessari Quotes

A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.

Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

As small, quick, foolproof cameras became generally available, moreover, the camera has been used so much and so flabbily by so many people that it has acted as a sort of contraceptive on the ability to see.

There was a camera club at Columbia, where I was taking a painting course. And when I went down, somebody showed me how to use the stuff. That's all. I haven't done anything else since then, It was as simple as that. I fell into the business.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

You see the world much better through a camera.

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I could just work with my eyes alone. To get a satisfactory print, one that contains all that you intended, is very often more difficult and dangerous than the sitting itself. When I’m photographing, I immediately know when I’ve got the image I really want. But to get the image out of the camera and into the open, is another matter.

Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.

The digital camera has given me total freedom and a different way of filming.

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.

Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.

The [35mm] camera is for life and for people, the swift and intense moments of life.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

It gives you more freedom, the digital camera.

Forget the camera, forget the lens, forget all of that. With any four-dollar camera, you can capture the best picture.

What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet.

Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.

Similar thing until today, with digital cameras you look after something like that as robust as they can be.

My friend who I went to boarding school with was interested in photography. He insisted that I buy a camera and marched me downtown.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them.

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.