Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Walker Evans
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: November 3
Died: 1975
Died: April 10
Journalist
Photographer
Photojournalist
St. Louis
Missouri
Ever
Photography
Come
Theory
Work
Sort
Things
Eyes
Rather
Impetus
Eye
Blindly
Seems
Photographer
Best
Response
More quotes by Walker Evans
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
It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.
Walker Evans
I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.
Walker Evans
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
What America needs is a political revolution.
Walker Evans
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
The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
Walker Evans
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
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
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
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
The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.
Walker Evans
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.
Walker Evans
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
I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.
Walker Evans
That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
Walker Evans
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
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 unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman.
Walker Evans
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
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
