All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.
You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.
Then all at once in late August's heat, tall leafless stalks crowned with iridescent pink and purple blossoms burst from the purgatory in the earth. This arcane act of nature, though perceived by us as ordinary, is a manifestation of Maya's phantom play, the great immensity expressed in every way. My garden is the universe. I am the universe. I am my garden. All things are the same.
One of the marvelous things about film is that if you expose it long enough you're going to get a picture.
Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.
I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.
The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.
I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.
My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.
I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are.
Art has to address eternal issues.
If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by.
I already know what things look like - I don't want description. People believe in appearances, and I don't believe in appearances at all.
I often try to photograph things about a person that are not visible.
If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was 33 years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography.
To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.
I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.
You can never capture a person in picture, never. You might get an interesting expression or gesture. I almost never research a picture subject ahead of time. I think Karsh is full of baloney. Can you imagine spending a whole week out in La Jolla with Jonas Salk soaking up his ambiance, then wind up making him look as if he's in the studio in Ottawa with his thumb under his chin?
I believe in invisible; I do not believe in visible.
I don't get straight people, but I understand what they look like.
To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
I think that the photographer must completely control his picture and bring to it all his personality, and in this area most photographs never transcend being just snapshots. When a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful.
Flowers construct the most charming geometries: circles like the sun, ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass seem a Lilliputian frieze of psychedelic silhouettes.
I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.
I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.
