Gordon Parks Quotes

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.

The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.

I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.

I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love.

Music is not simply an orchestration of something, but it's also not something as trivial as honesty.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

A great painting is a great painting.

I love photography, and I love the art of photography.

When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.

Dancers are a work of art - they are the canvas on which their work is painted.

What one person might see as violent, someone else may see as beautiful. Maybe even art.

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.

I love the way painting is so full of illusionistic possibilities.

In the bit of painting that I've done, I'm interested in colour and texture. I'm very interested in transparency.

In everything I do, the aesthetics are driven by the emotion. However I can do that with a camera, whether it's a long lens or a wide lens, I'll do.

Style is objective, akin to art, so it varies.