Quote

Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.

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
Film
Photography
Vulgar
Must
Green
Tends
Kiddies
Way
Blue
Absolutes
Foliage
Usually
Absolute
Corrupts
Color
Red
Renders
Four
Sky
Lipstick
Simple
Consider
Whispered
Words
Absolutely
Corrupt

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Nobody should touch a Polaroid [camera] until he's over sixty
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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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It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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... 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 wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.
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Do we know what we look like? Not really.
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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.
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The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.
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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.
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Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
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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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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.
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