Visual Understanding Quotes

We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like.

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

The art of watching has become mere skill at rapid apperception and understanding of continuously changing visual images. The younger generation has acquired this cinematic perception to an amazing degree.

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.

No longer can we consider what the artist does to be a self-contained activity, mysteriously inspired from above, unrelated and unrelatable to other human activities. Instead, we recognize the exalted kind of seeing that leads to the creation of great art as an outgrowth of the humbler and more common activity of the eyes in everyday life. Just as the prosaic search for information is "artistic" because it involves giving and finding shape and meaning, so the artist's conceiving is an instrument of life, a refined way of understanding who and where we are.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

It is always a problem to know what an image means.

Without claiming superiority of intellectual over visual understanding, one is nevertheless bound to admit that the cinema allowsa number of æsthetic-intellectual means of perception to remain unexercised which cannot but lead to a weakening of judgment.

A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.

All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion…What you see is what you see.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

I've always said the one advantage an actor has of converting to a director is that he's been in front of the camera. He doesn't have to get in front of the camera again, subliminally or otherwise.

A visual understanding of great composition and how to use a camera and expensive lenses can be learned, but drive and a real hunger for making photos and telling stories... I don't think that part can be learned. You either have that inside, or you don't.

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

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

I think the purpose of the writer is to help us see. The writer is someone who can perhaps have the joy of helping others see.

What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions.

The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex.