Quote

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

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Walker Evans
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: November 3
Died: 1975
Died: April 10
Journalist
Photographer
Photojournalist
St. Louis
Missouri
Style
Documentary
Term
Documentaries
Clear
Documents
Word
Sophisticated
Use
Whereas
Art
Useless
Misleading
Really
Photographer
Mislead
Photography
Document

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The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
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The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
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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.
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... nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Good photography is unpretentious.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
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I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.
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Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens.
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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