Walker Evans Quotes About Photography

Quotes about: Photography

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Self, Looks

• 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

  Photography, Thinking, Purpose

  Thomas Southall, Walker Evans, James Agee, Friends of Photography, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art (1990). “Of time & place: Walker Evans and William Christenberry”, Friends of Photography Bookstore

• 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

• 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

  Photography, Men, People

• 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

• ... nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Thinking, Looks

• 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

  Photography, Yale, Use

• 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”

• 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

  Photography, Fall, Government

  Thomas Southall, Walker Evans, James Agee, Friends of Photography, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art (1990). “Of time & place: Walker Evans and William Christenberry”, Friends of Photography Bookstore

• 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

  Photography, Strong, Mean

• 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

• 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

  Photography, Dream, Real

• Good photography is unpretentious.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Photographer, Good Photography

• When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Art, Real

  Jeff Rosenheim, Walker Evans, Jane Ninas, Historic New Orleans Collection (1991). “Walker Evans and Jane Ninas in New Orleans, 1935-1936”, Historic New Orleans

• 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

  Photography, Believe, Quality

  Walker Evans, Maria Morris Hambourg, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2000). “Walker Evans”, p.131, Metropolitan Museum of Art

• 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

• 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".

• The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Independent, Eye

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