Jerry Uelsmann Quotes

My creative process begins when I get out with the camera and interact with the world. A camera is truly a license to explore. There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people.

The camera basically is a license to explore.

Photography is just light remembering itself.

I think of my photographs as being obviously symbolic, but not symbolically obvious.

It's equally hard and labor intensive to create an image on the computer as it is in a darkroom. Believe me.

I have gradually confused photography with life.

The goal of the artist is not to resolve life's mysteries, but to deepen them.

Of course, in order to make art, the frustration of not working has to be greater than the frustration of working.

My visual quest is driven by a desire to create a universe capable of supporting feelings and ideas.

Well, I do think, particularly the way I work, the better images occur when you're moving to the fringes of your own understanding. That's where self-doubt and risk taking are likely to occur. It's when you trust what's happening at a non-intellectual non-conscious level that you can produce work that later resonates, often in a way that you can't articulate a response to.

The simple act of having a camera, not a cell phone, but a camera-camera, there’s a kind of a heightened perceptional awareness that occurs. Like, I could walk from here to the highway in two minutes, but if I had a camera, that walk could take me two hours.

It is the illusion of knowledge, not ignorance, that keeps one from growing.

One of the major changes in attitude that occurred in the world of art as we moved from the nineteenth into the twentieth century was that the twentieth century artist became more involved with personal expression than with celebrating exclusively the values of the society or the church. Along with this change came a broader acceptance of the belief that the artist can invent a reality that is more meaningful than the one that is literally given to the eye. I subscribe enthusiastically to this.

Ultimately, my hope is to amaze myself.

In the arts there are many right answers.

When the entire process becomes a prescribed ritual that does not allow for spontaneous variations and reactions, the vitality of the medium and our relation to it suffers.

The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality