Quote

Do we know what we look like? Not really.

Walker Evans

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walker Evans
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: November 3
Died: 1975
Died: April 10
Journalist
Photographer
Photojournalist
St. Louis
Missouri
Look
Self
Looks
Really
Like
Photographer
Photography

More quotes by Walker Evans

Image
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 is really useless.
Walker Evans
Image
What America needs is a political revolution.
Walker Evans
Image
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
Image
The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
Walker Evans
Image
The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
Walker Evans
Image
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
Image
I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.
Walker Evans
Image
That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
Walker Evans
Image
Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
Walker Evans
Image
I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.
Walker Evans
Image
Privilege, if you're very strict, is an immoral and unjust thing to have, but if you've got it you didn't choose to get it and you might as well use it. You're privileged to be at Yale, but you know you're under an obligation to repay what's been put into you.
Walker Evans
Image
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
Image
I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.
Walker Evans
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Nobody should touch a Polaroid [camera] until he's over sixty
Walker Evans
Image
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