Black Lives Matter

 

Start creating your artworks without thinking so much. One day, you will find that you have been doing it for a long time. —Yoko Ono

 

would

you still want to travel to

that

country

if

you could not take a camera with you.

 

— a question of appropriation (Nayyirah Waheed)

  

Trust your instincts

Be inside your work

Set aside your ego

(unattributed quote I found on a scrap of paper at work)

 

Keep your eyes open. — Robert Frank's advice to photography students

 

Seeing is a neglected enterprise. — Saul Leiter

 

For something to be beautiful it doesn’t have to be pretty. — Rei Kawakubo

 

Let it be, don’t force it, don’t try to chase it, just let it happen. If it’s real, if it’s speaking to you, then that’s what you move on. — Cody ChestnuTT

 

If you wish to understand the secrets of the Universe, think of energy, frequency, and vibration. — Nikola Tesla

 

Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand—relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it. — Osho

 

so much depends

upon

 

a red wheel

barrow

 

glazed with rain

water

 

beside the white

chickens.

 

— William Carlos Williams

 

When we say of a work of art, "I didn't get it," we don't mean only that we didn't understand it but literally that we didn't receive it. It didn't cross over to where we are. It just left us as it found us, on our own. — Jen Graves

 

The villain is the artist, and also the viewer. — Jen Graves, regarding Mr.'s film Nobody Dies

 

A man is in love with a great many things strewn about haphazardly all over the country…He…can be in love with streets, towns, and cities: railroad tracks, telegraph poles, houses, porches, lawns. He can go out in search of a fresh assorting and arranging of these things, and of the people of them.

 

—William Saroyan from The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills

 

I’m never drawing the object itself; I’m only drawing a depiction of the object- a kind of crystallized symbol of it. —Roy Lichtenstein

 

Architecture, interior décors and street furniture, are expressions of one’s culture and beliefs. You can tell so much even by looking at a street sign or a telephone pole.

— Gabor Szilasi

 

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

— Susan Sontag

 

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

— Cyril Connolly, 1933

  

Good art has proved time and time again that the banal is still not without wonder.

— Jen Graves

 

Logical arrangements aren't very interesting. — Liu Xiaodong

 

It's like all they can see is the three-legged dog. — Matika Wilbur

 

The memory of it is better than any picture could have been. ― Jeff Turner

 

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

 

― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

 

on-the-spot decisions, in-jokes, mistranslations, happy accidents. Fragment of a quote about something else taken out of context.

 

Before a person studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are not waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.

 

— Zen saying

 

Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies. Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda. — Martin Parr

 

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed. — Garry Winogrand

  

About the name...

 

We must not, Charlie, blink, Charlie, because, Charlie, as I’ve said, Charlie, before, John McCain has said, Charlie, that — and remember here, Charlie, we’re talking about John McCain, Charlie, who, Charlie, is John McCain and I won’t be blinking, Charlie

 

- Maureen Dowd