Visual Reality Quotes

I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?

Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.

Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.

Photography sees surfaces, it doesn't see space. We see space but the camera doesn't.

Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.

It is difficult to talk about fashion in the abstract, without a human body before my eyes, without drawings, without a choice of fabric - without a practical or visual reality.

Human vision is endowed with the greatest Reality, since it comes to us directly from the contemplation of the Universe.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

We have a great responsibility. Whatever we make will become the truth, the visual reality that a generation will accept.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.

While it may seem a little mundane, the material realities of realizing the painting actually have a lot to do with how you should read the painting. For example, we assume that what the model is wearing is what we found him in in the streets. No; in fact, a lot of what happens is that in Photoshop certain aspects are being heightened or diminished. There is no actual material truth in these paintings.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

If you were blind you would hardly have fallen in love in the first place. But now, do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your better interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form.

Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.