Reality Quotes - Page 37

• As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.

  Lewis Mumford

  Photography, Quilts, Crazy

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• Photographic data... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.

  Salvador Dali

  Mean, Osmosis, Data

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• The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.

  Emile Zola

  Mean, Giving, Alive

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• ... Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again.

  Thomas Merton

  Mind, Shadow, Doe

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• Reality is a concept that depends largely upon where you point your face.

  Demetri Martin

  Faces, Your Face, Depends

  Demetri Martin (2013). “Point Your Face at This: Drawings”, p.3, Hachette UK

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• I've been writing jokes since I'm fifteen. Not out of happiness, but to go to a different place, because reality wasn't good to me.

  Rodney Dangerfield

  Happiness, Writing, Different

  "Rodney Dangerfield: What I've Learned" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

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• I believe in the invisible. I do not believe in the definitive reality of things around us. For me, reality is the intuition and the imagination and the quiet voice inside my head that says: isn't that extraordinary? The things in our lives are the shadows of reality, just as we ourselves are shadows.

  Duane Michals

  Believe, Quiet Voice, Imagination

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• There is nothing like waking up at six in the morning and changing a baby's nappy to bring you face to face with life's reality.

  Tony Blair

  Baby, Morning, Waking

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• We've seen the reality of Saddam's regime: his thugs prepared to kill their own people, the parading of prisoners of war and now the release of those pictures of executed British soldiers.

  Tony Blair

  War, Thug, British Soldiers

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• The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.

  John Loengard

  Photography, Thinking, Hands

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• Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty.

  John Loengard

  True Beauty, Records, Photograph

  John Loengard (1987). “Pictures under discussion”, Amphoto Books

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• Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Doubt, Language, Drowning

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• Always the rationalization is the same-"Once this situation is remedied, then I will be happy." But it never works that way in reality: The goal is achieved, but the person who reaches it is not the same person who dreamed it. The goal was static, but the person's identity was dynamic.

  Phillip Moffitt

  Goal, Identity, Way

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• ... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.

  Walter Benjamin

  Simple, Yield, Doe

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• As [John Heartfield] was playing with the fire of appearance, reality took fire around him... The scraps of photographs that he formerly manoeuvred for the pleasure of stupification, under his fingers began to signify.

  Louis Aragon

  Fire, Appearance, Pleasure

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• The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)

  James Agee

  Eye, Artist, Tasks

  Helen Levitt, James Agee (1989). “A way of seeing”

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• The reality is I'm not this person with this driving 'get it done' attitude.

  Greg Giraldo

  Attitude, Done, Driving

  "Greg Giraldo on Failure". Interview With Jay Dixit, www.psychologytoday.com. May 13, 2009.

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• The reality is I'm not a 'get knocked down and come back harder' kind of guy.

  Greg Giraldo

  Guy, Down And, Kind

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance.

  Peter Brook

  Photography, Views, Personality

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• The images which the [press] photographer has filtered from reality, whether particular events or the anguish of human reactions to them, already bear a stamp of authenticity which the photographer is powerless to alter by one jot or tittle; the meaning of the objects, by a process of purification, itself becomes the theme of the work.

  Yukio Mishima

  Events, Bears, Photographer

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• Any dramatic series the producers want us to take seriously as a representationof contemporary reality cannot be taken seriously as a representation ofanything - except a show to be ignored by anyone capable of sitting uprightin a chair and chewing gum simultaneously.

  Richard Schickel

  Taken, Sitting, Gum

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• There is no better moment than this moment, when we're anticipating the actual moment itself. All of the moments that lead up to the actual moment are truly the best moments. Those are the moments that are filled with good times. Those are the moments in which you are able to think that it is going to be perfect, when the moment actually happens. But, the moment is reality, and reality always kinda sucks!

  Lewis Black

  Thinking, Perfect, Able

  "Anticipation". Comedy album, 2008.

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• When I went to jail, reality hit so hard that it took my breath away, took my stance away, took my strength away. I was there buck naked, humiliated, sitting in my own crap and urine - this is a metaphor. My ego had run off. Your ego is the biggest coward.

  Tim Allen

  Running, Jail, Ego

  “Tim Allen: What I've Learned” by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. October 11, 2011.

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• Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such the autonomous movement of non-life.

  Guy Debord

  Expression, Forever, Unity

  Guy Debord (1994). “The Society of the Spectacle”, Zone Books (NY)

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• It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.

  Jean-Francois Lyotard

  Allusion

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