Lynsey Addario Quotes

But if you're talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

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

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

I'm not trying to do conceptual art.

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

This is what I like about being a designer: You can't really get it until you see it.

I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.

I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.

That's my whole point as an artist - I'm trying to get you to turn a page.

I make pictures to tell a story, to tell lies, and to amuse.

I don't want to do animation to mimic reality. I want to push reality.

Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.

I’m trying to please myself; certainly that’s a big criterion... though in a sense, I don’t take images just for myself. I take images that I think other people will want to see. I don’t take pictures to put in a box and hide them. I want as many people to see them as possible.

I try to create paintings that are a window for the imagination. If people look at my work and are reminded of the way things once were, or perhaps, the way they could be, then I've done my job.

I am a director because I believe in my own impulses and my own point of view, and that belief encourages me to tell stories that will move, provoke, and change people. But I became a director because I wanted to be a part of the world.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.