Walker Evans Quotes

Quotes about:

• The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Character, Personality

  Walker Evans, Jeff Rosenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.) (2002). “Walker Evans : polaroids”, Scalo Verlag Ac

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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.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Art, Eye

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• Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

  Walker Evans

  Knowing, Long, Staring

  Walker Evans (2004). “Many are Called”, p.202, Yale University Press

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• 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

  Photography, Simple, Blue

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• The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Eye, Feelings

  Lesley K. Baier, Walker Evans, Jewett Arts Center (Wellesley, Mass.) (1977). “Walker Evans at Fortune, 1945-1965, Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 16 November, 1977-23 January, 1978”

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• Good photography is unpretentious.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Photographer, Good Photography

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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

  Reality, Order, Fabric

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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

  Photography, Trying, Needs

  "Walker Evans at Fortune, 1945-1965".

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• Do we know what we look like? Not really.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Self, Looks

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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

  Photography, Light, Air

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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.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Lying, Vision

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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

  Photography, Art, Leaving

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• I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.

  Walker Evans

  Writing, Wanted

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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

  Art, Style, Use

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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

  Cute, Photography, Beach

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• With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Thinking, Editing

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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.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Art, Style

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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

  Photography, Eye, Photographer

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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

  Ideas, Portraits, Documentaries

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• Incidentally, part of a photographer’s gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what you’re doing and feel all right about it, and you can do terrible work if you put them on the defense, which they all are at the beginning. You’ve got to take them off their defensive attitude and make them participate.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Attitude, People

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• It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.

  Walker Evans

  Eye, Way, Staring

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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.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Art, Arrogance

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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

  Life, God, Photography

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• I began to wonder - I knew I was an artist or wanted to be one - but I was wondering whether I really was an artist. I was doing such ordinary things that I could feel the difference. Most people would look at those things and say, 'Well, that's nothing. What did you do that for? That's just a wreck of a car or a wreck of a man. That's nothing. That isn't art.' They don't say that anymore.

  Walker Evans

  Art, Men, Differences

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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

  Photography, Men, Definitions

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