D. A. Pennebaker Quotes

It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us.

You can't tell what a man is like or what he is thinking when you are looking at him. You must get around behind him and see what he has been looking at.

I observe the world and the people surrounding me.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

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

The analysis of concepts is for the understanding nothing more than what the magnifying glass is for sight.

I think I have a very detailed sense of observation. I am interested in the details of people's lives and what information these details give.

To look is one thing, to see is another thing; to see is very difficult, normally; to look is to try to see. I have looked and I hope I have seen.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

I just go out and try to make sense of the world around me.

I saw that my camera gave me a sense of connection with others that I never had before. It allowed me to enter lives, satisfying a curiosity that was always there but that was never explored before.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.

You can learn more from a person just from their observations and how they see the world. More so than just talking.

I like it when one is not certain what one sees. When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion.

Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.

I don't take the camera out with me. My eyes are the camera for me every day.

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.

A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.

If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won't see anything.