Photographer Quotes - Page 16

• The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don't know, or already know and should take seriously.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Prayer, Offering

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• This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Heart, Landscape

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• I feel that whatever picture an artist makes it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Artist, Identity

  Peter C. Bunnell, Emmet Gowin, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Princeton University. Art Museum (1983). “Emmet Gowin: photographs, 1966-1983 : September 17-November 13, 1983, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington”

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• What's great is that the picture is already taken before it goes public. It's in secret. The trust that develops from such a habit engenders risk, and you realise you're not as vulnerable as you thought. Once you become comfortable with being more truthful about who you are, the easier it is, the prouder you become. That's the way it unfolded for us.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Taken, Risk

  "Emmet Gowin: 'Everyone thought my photographs were incestuous'". Interview with Sarah Moroz, www.theguardian.com. May 29, 2014.

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• Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Art, Butterfly

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• I am pessimistic about a picture's power to be the emissary of just one thing. What I hope is that the picture says, "Here I am, this is what I am like," and the person seeing the picture says in return, 'You know a lot but you don't know half of what I know.'

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Here I Am, Pessimistic

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• I was going round the world searching for an interesting place, when I realized that the place that I was in was already interesting.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Interesting, World

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• I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Years, Waste

  "Emmet Gowin: 'Everyone thought my photographs were incestuous'". Interview with Sarah Moroz, www.theguardian.com. May 29, 2014.

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• Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera.

  Eliot Porter

  Photography, Buttons, Cameras

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• Photographs are believed more than words; thus they can be used persuasively to show people who have never taken the trouble to look what is there.

  Eliot Porter

  Photography, Taken, People

  "Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics". Book by Rebecca Solnit, p. 235, 2007.

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• I don't think it's necessary to put your feelings about photography in words. I've read things that photographers have written for exhibitions and so forth about their subjective feelings about photography and mostly I think it's disturbing. I think they're fooling themselves very often. They're just talking, they're not saying anything.

  Eliot Porter

  Photography, Thinking, Talking

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• I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.

  Eliot Porter

  Photography, Purpose, May

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• But before all else a work of art is the creation of love. Love for the subject first and for the medium second. Love is the fundamental necessity underlying the need to create, underlying the emotion that gives it form, and from which grows the unfinished product that is presented to the world. Love is the general criterion by which the rare photograph is judged. It must contain it to be not less than the best of which the photographer is capable.

  Eliot Porter

  Photography, Art, Love Is

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• My emotions, instincts, and interests are all with nature.

  Eliot Porter

  Photography, Emotion, Instinct

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• I have always been fascinated by the life cycle, the way skin metamorphoses over time. I am mesmerized by skin and that's why I've been attracted to the nude. I do think people show their soul when they are stripped down psychically. There is something wondrous that happens when we relate on that level - and I am interested in that depth.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Thinking, People

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• I try to neutralize my figures; I want them to be mythic and timeless. I want them to exist beyond time. I've used the skull caps or cowls to banish hair, which is distracting. I want to isolate the face and concentrate on what is really going on deep within my subjects.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Hair, Skulls

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• Over the years I have photographed thousands of people. I have never stopped being curious and trying to discover new worlds. I have used my camera as a mirror for my subjects as well. I remember photographing a woman in her 80s for my book, Wise Women, who told me it had been a long time since anyone had really been interested in "seeing" or photographing her. When she saw the picture, she burst into tears. She saw something in the photograph, an inner beauty and soul, she felt had long ago vanished.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Wise, Photography, Book

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• The people I work with, the people I photograph, become a kind of family for me.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, People, Kind

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• I love feeling that I am opening new worlds for people who don't have time to investigate these things themselves.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, People, Feelings

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• I would never censor something to please someone. I don't play games.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Games, Play

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• Michaelangelo said the mirror is our greatest teacher. My use of mirrors in my work helps me uncover psychic layers. Often, the face is distorted in the mirror so it is much more than a simple reflection. Sometimes something surprising emerges - some darkness or secret appears without us knowing why or giving it permission.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Teacher, Reflection

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• I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Artist, Self

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• My whole artistic life has been devoted to battling myself and my ability to externalize my deepest emotions. As I have gotten older, the work has become more direct, perhaps reflecting the fact that for the first time in my life I feel really free. I have been fascinated with wings all my life. I have had an obsession with transcendence, the need to push forward and metaphorically fly.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Artistic Life, Wings

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• I found that I wanted to be best friends with almost all the women I interviewed because they had been through something. They were closing in on the circle of their journey and they had a kind of wisdom that comes from their long life.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Journey, Circles

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• I never chased after any particular school, never really had mentors; I really just did the work that was true to me.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, School, Mentor

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