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That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.

Walker Evans

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Walker Evans
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: November 3
Died: 1975
Died: April 10
Journalist
Photographer
Photojournalist
St. Louis
Missouri
Mankind
Ought
Anonymous
Idea
Portrait
Ideas
Documentary
Straightforward
Documentaries
Portraits
Picture

More quotes by Walker Evans

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You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, although it can adopt that style.
Walker Evans
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Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.
Walker Evans
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I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what's before your eyes.
Walker Evans
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It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.
Walker Evans
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Detachment, lack of sentimentality, originality, a lot of things that sound rather empty. I know what they mean. Let's say, visual impact may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though. I mean it's a quality that something has or does not have. Coherence. Well, some things are weak, some things are strong.
Walker Evans
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Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
Walker Evans
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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 one thing when I'm thought to be doing another.
Walker Evans
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I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.
Walker Evans
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In order to put meaning back into our lives, we should recognize illusions for what they are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.
Walker Evans
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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 matter-something vital that we cannot build out of these parts. There is surely something else, some piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and that owes no homage to the sun.
Walker Evans
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What America needs is a political revolution.
Walker Evans
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It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.
Walker Evans
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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 the sun, moon, and stars. It has mapped the heavens, leaving no place for gods to live.
Walker Evans
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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: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing it is the defining of observation full and felt.
Walker Evans
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It's too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else... I equate that with propaganda I think that's a lower rank of purpose.
Walker Evans
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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 we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.
Walker Evans
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Nobody should touch a Polaroid [camera] until he's over sixty
Walker Evans
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I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.
Walker Evans
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The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
Walker Evans
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I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn't need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.
Walker Evans