Creative Documentation Quotes

When I'm travelling, I always take my little notebook and scribble things down as I watch them; I'm very much geared to everything that's happening. Whereas, the diary I keep is just about a record of a day I've spent. When I'm filming, I'm looking quite intensely at everything I see and trying to get my own eye on what we're going through.

The songs are just an attempt to document what's been happening in my life. If people can relate to what's going on with me, then that's great.

My inspiration is endless; I can't define it. It is a constant flow and evolution. In general, I'm taking it from everywhere. People get nervous when they walk with me, as I'll see something and suddenly have to text it to myself.

So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America.

Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.

I've photographed everybody from Matisse to Isamu Noguchi.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I'm going through or what's going on in my life at that moment.

To photograph is to confer importance.

I feel the reasons my songs might seem dark is because of how I viewed the situations I was in and it was just something I always felt like documenting.

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

When we started making 'Where You Live', I bought a bunch of Polaroid cameras in so that people could record the experience. Some of those pictures are in the CD sleeve.

Artists don't think archivally.

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

I don't own a camera, so I travel with a police sketch artist.

I loved playing with the mix of fantastical inventions and real ones. I hope kids will start logbooks to record their own creations.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Like, music and songs, what we do, we can capture history as artists, so that's what I really try to do.

One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.

I was in Milan, and somebody gave me a Trussardi diary, and I thought 'Genius.' Inside I put the Polaroids, how much film I shot, who I shot with. This way, for billing later on, I had all the information.

I would drown in objects if I didn't have the ability to photograph them.

I was always interested in drawing. As a child, I started my own country, which was called Neubern. It was located in the South Atlantic. I did the documentation of Neubern in great detail. I drew everything that was there, all the houses and all the cars and all the people. We even had a navy and an air force. I spent a lot of time drawing.

It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.