Walker Evans Quotes

26 quotes in 473 categories

• It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.
• The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
• Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this:…
• Somewhere in our search for reality we have passed something by, something important that we no longer find amid the bits and pieces of disassembled…
• It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.
• I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.
• With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't…
• That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
• Nobody should touch a Polaroid [camera] until he's over sixty
• What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even…
• Science has discovered much. The engineering is wonderful, epicycles and all. And yet, as we look at this vast, elaborate structure built on layer and…
• I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn't need to. If the thing…
• Science has rolled its war wagons over the crushed myths of so many religious beliefs. It has marshaled its mechanics to explain the motions of…
• Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.
• Incidentally, part of a photographer’s gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what…
• I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing…
• It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as…
• Good photography is unpretentious.
• Do we know what we look like? Not really.
• Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art…

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