Keith Carter Inspirational Quotes (9)

I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.

Making these photographs has often seemed to me like a kind of dance. Often I have danced badly and the world has fallen apart at my feet. But sometimes the dance has gone well and my subject and I have moved together as if with shared purpose.

Your ideas come out of the way you conduct your life.

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

I don't think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.

The raw materials of photography are light and time and memory.

At a fundamental level photography is much like pointing, and all of us occasionally point at things: look at that, look at that sailboat, look at that tree, etc. etc.

When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision one eye perceives space from the other. I don't experience a scene visually at F32. It's more like F1.4.

I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.