"You are taking everything in the world and selecting this rectangle out of that"

 

"Aim well, shoot fast and scram"

 

“The world is open wide to the photographer who can see. And one can never be bored if one can see.”

 

"You learn how to use the machine, then you walk around in the world and you see who you are by the way you respond to things in the world."

 

‎"When I first got into photography, it was around the time the internet was taking off. I love the internet and I love bouncing around, but I think we all sometimes feel like, “wow, does the real world exist anymore?” We’re so inside this digital realm. Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life. You get up you go out, bounce around, sort of web surf, but encountering real things and real people and wake up to the fact that things still have smells and sounds. It makes you more optimistic, because one gets pessimistic when you sit in front of a screen for too long. It’s an excuse to wander, that said, I have huge problems with the role of photography. I think it’s a great hobby, but I struggle with its larger role. I’m conflicted in that I do it because deep down it’s fun, but why show it to other people then?"

 

"Its not about how you feel, about how shitty or great its going, you have to look at the pictures and see where they lead. You cannot want the pictures to be a certain way or the idea to be what you thought it was going to be, you have to let it unfold and show you what it is. It’s bigger than you, thank God - that’s why its not about you and how miserable you may feel or the lack of faith you may have during a project. It’s about the pictures. You have to be a good self-critic."

 

"Of time capsules and lost youth, of magical places and greasy faces, of gasoline and big motors and power and of freedom and the urge to sin. Of touching and shivering and howling and quivering, of coming and of wide eyed grins and devastating energy and running like the wind. Of all that was waiting out there for you and of everything that lay ahead."

 

"Most of us know how to point a black box at the things that give us pleasure. The new, the quaint, the odd. A 50th of a second of the sunshine is enough to produce a black and white outline that we can fill in later, from memory."

 

Would like to get closer to this way of thinking - "Once I know how to do something, I don’t want to do it anymore. I would rather explore. Take chances. Set myself up for a big fall. Keying off the actually really old idea that unless you are reaching beyond what you know how to do, you are simply repeating a known skill set and this keeps most people happy most of the time, but no way will it lead to the creative edge where the real magic happens. The very same precipices where the total disasters happen as well."

 

“Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.”

 

"But all of this makes me think about fast food and how much you crave it sometimes, and then, when you get it, it sucks. So you throw it out, a lot like other things that you think you really want and then when it’s your reality, you don’t want it anymore. Because there is always some sort of disappointment when sleeping with your fantasy. So really, the person you think you want to date is not the person you want to date at all. They’re just really bad French fries."

 

“You’re a really good photographer. Your pictures are really good. But who gives a shit? Where are you in the work? Nobody cares about good photography anymore”

 

"Oh yes. I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat guiltily. I thought it was a substitute for something else – well, for writing, for one thing. I wanted to write. But I became very engaged with all things there were to be had out of a camera, and became compulsive about it. It was a real drive. Particularly when the lighting was right, you couldn’t keep me in. I was a little shame-faced about it, because most photography had about it a ludicrous, almost comic side, I thought. A “photographer” was a figure held in great disdain. Later I used that defiantly. But then, I suppose, I thought photographing was a minor thing to be doing. And I guess I thought I ought to be writing. In Paris, I had been trying to write. But in writing I felt blocked – mostly by high standards. Writing’s a very daring thing to do. I’d done a lot of reading, and I knew what writing was. But shy young men are seldom daring."

 

"Well, that’s what makes photography so special and interesting and unknown as an art, and that’s why so many people don’t see anything at all. The point is difficult and abstruse. And that’s why I say half jokingly that photography’s the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground. With the camera, it’s all or nothing. You either get what you’re after at once or what you do has to be worthless. I don’t think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take you have to do the editing. The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and the personality of the handler. The mind works on the machine – through it, rather."

 

"I didn’t know ahead of time. I was on vacation with my family. The shot was there. Boom. But I do think you can sense when certain locations have potential. Photographs don’t come randomly. I think they come in waves, and you need to tune in to your surroundings to sense when a wave is impending. Good photographers develop a sixth sense."

 

"Photographing in the street with a Leica doesn’t have much to do with planning. You walk out the door and—bang!—like everyone else, you’re part of the great urban cavalcade. But unlike everyone else, you’re carrying an amazing little machine that, joined with a lot of effort, can pull poetry out of a walk downtown. All of the failed pictures you’ve ever made, all of the other photographs you’ve ever loved, even songs and lines from poems walk with you too, insinuating themselves into your decisions about what you’ll make your photographs of, and how you’ll shape them as pictures. The process, if anything, is intuitive rather than the product of planning—although the fact that very few people have been able to produce this kind of work at a high level also suggests how difficult it is. In other words, intuitive may not be an adequate word for describing the stew of wildness, dogged work and hard thought that goes into producing the best of this kind of photography."

 

"If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it."

 

"As the spirit wanes the form appears."

 

"How do you make a photograph that is more interesting than what actually happened? How do you beat it?"

 

"Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it, not to persuade but to understand. The world, in spite of its terrors, is approached as the ultimate source of wonder and fascination, no less precious for being irrational and incoherent."

 

"I know that some photographers have big egos, but photography is simple. In the morning, you put a roll of film in your camera – and today, you don’t even have to do this with digital – you take to the streets, you come back home, edit your photographs and show them. It’s that simple."

 

"By means of photography one can in a minute reject as unsatisfactory ninety-nine configurations of facts and elect as right the hundredth. The choice is based on tradition and intuition - knowledge and ego - as it is in any art, but the ease of execution and the richness of the possibilities in photography both serve to put a premium on good intuition. The photographer's problem is perhaps too complex to be dealt with rationally. This is why photographers prowl with such restless uncertainty about their motif, ignoring many potentially interesting records while they look for something else."

 

"Well, look, there's an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference. And if you study those pictures, you'll see I use the vertical often enough. I use either edge. If it's as good as the vertical edge, it's as good as the horizontal edge. I never do it without a reason. The only ones you'll see are the ones that work. There's various reasons for doing it. But they're not tilted, you see."

 

"Be more aggressive. Be more involved. Talk to people. Stay with the subject. Be patient. Take simpler pictures. Don't take boring pictures. Get in closer.”

 

“When people see you, the picture’s gone for good. You cannot repeat it. Once people have noticed you, you have to give up. That’s it. You blew it.”

 

"I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes."

 

"All a photograph ever does is describe light on surface. That's all there is."

  

"First and foremost, you have to have a camera that fits you well, one that you like, because it’s about feeling comfortable with what you have in your hands: the equipment is key to any profession, and it should have nothing more than the strictly necessary features. Secondly, get yourself an enlarger, the easiest and most useful you can find (the smallest manufactured by LEITZ is the best for the 35mm format, it will last your whole lifetime).

 

The game is going on an adventure, like a sailor boat: drop the sails. Go to Valparaiso or Chiloè, be in the street all day long, wander and wander in unknown places, sit under a tree when you’re tired, buy a banana or some bread and get on the first train, go wherever you like, and look, draw a bit, and look. Get away from the things you know, get closer to those you don’t know, go from one place to the other, places you like. Then, you’ll start finding things, images will be forming into your head, consider them as apparitions.

 

When you will be back home, develop, print and start looking at what you fished, all of your fishes, print them in the size of a postcard and tape them to a wall, and look at them. Then, start playing around with the L, cropping and framing, thus you will learn about composition and geometry. Enlarge what you framed and leave it on the wall. By looking, you will learn to see. When you are certain that a photograph is not good, throw it in the bin. Tape the best ones higher on the wall, and eventually look at those only (keeping the not-so-good one gets you used to not-so-goodness). Only save the good ones, throw everything else away, because the psyche carries everything one keeps.

 

Then do some exercise, use your time to do other things, and don’t worry about it. Start studying the work of others and looking for something good in whatever comes into your hands: books, magazines, etc. and keep the best ones, and cut them out if you can, keep the good things and tape them to the wall next to yours, and if you can’t cut them out, open the book or magazine at the good pages and leave it open. Leave it there for weeks, months, until it speaks to you: it takes time to see, but the secret will slowly reveal itself, and eventually you will see what is good and the essence of everything.

 

Go on with your life, draw a bit, take a walk, but don’t force yourself to taking photographs: this kills the poetry, the life in it gets sick. It would be like forcing love or a friendship: you can’t do it. Then you can take a new journey: to Porto Aguire, you can ride down the Baker to the storms in Aysén; Valparaiso is always beautiful, it’s getting lost in the magic, getting lost for days up and down its slopes and streets, sleeping in a sleeping bag, so much soaked in reality – like a swimmer in the water – that nothing distracts you, nothing conventional.

 

Let your feet guide you, slowly, as if you were cured by the pleasure of looking, humming, and what you will see you will start photographing more carefully, and you will learn about composition and framing, you will do it with your camera, and thus your cart will fill with fishes, and you will go back home. Learn about focus, aperture, close-ups, saturation, shutter speed, ecc. Learn how to play with your camera and its possibilities, and collect poetry (yours and that of others), keep everything good you can find, even that done by others. Make a collection of good things: like a small museum in a folder.

 

Photograph the way you like it. Don’t believe in nothing but your taste, you are life and it’s life that chooses. Don’t look at what you don’t like, there’s no need to. You are the only criterion, but also consider everything else. Keep learning. When you will have some good photos, enlarge them, make a small exhibition or put them in a book, have it bound. Showing your photographs will make you realize what they are, you will understand only when you will see them in front of others. Making an exhibition is giving something, like giving food, it’s good that others are shown something down with work and pleasure. It’s not bragging, it’s good to you, it’s good to everybody and it’s good for you because it gives you feedback.

 

Good, that’s enough to start. It’s about vagabonding much, sitting down a tree anywhere. It’s wandering in the universe by yourself: thus you will start again looking. The conventional world puts a veil over your eyes, it’s a matter of taking it off during the period of photography."

 

"There remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography. They get artists who use photography to illustrate their ideas, installations, performances and concepts, who 'deploy' the medium as one of a range of artistic strategies to complete their work. But photography for and of itself—photographs taken from the world as it is—are misunderstood as a collection of random observations and lucky moments, or muddled up with photojournalism, or tarred with a semi-derogatory 'documentary' tag.

 

This is tremendously sad, for if we look back, the simple truth is that the majority of the great photographic works of art in the 20th century operate in precisely this territory: from Walker Evans to Robert Frank, Diane Arbus to Garry Winogrand, from Stephen Shore traveling across America in Uncommon Places; Robert Adams navigating the freshly minted suburbs of Denver in The New West, or William Eggleston spiraling towards Jimmy Carter’s hometown in Election Eve, nobody would seriously propose that these sincere photographic artists were merely "snapping their surroundings."

 

"The primary problem is to learn to be your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and to work at the same time. You see. I mean, you’ve got to bounce off better work. It’s matter of working."

 

“That’s one of the gifts of the medium. The camera is a magical machine that can record something that’s completely true, and at the same time, a total lie— simply by stopping at the wrong moment. Subjects might look like they’re crying when they’re laughing, or look drunk when they just have their eyes closed. The point is, photography can describe everything in the frame in great detail, but the meaning of what’s described is ambiguous.”

 

"I recently wrote an article about photography and art; the essential point being that photography is an art but by and large as it is practiced by most photographers, will be remembered as a minor art because it lacks the essential ingredient of all major arts which is invention. Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing. I feel the more a photographer intrudes into the photograph, the more he creates. But people expect less from photography than they do from the other arts. They’re quite happy to simply reproduce someone’s face and they assume that that represents the person and if that person looks attractive, so much the better. It’s the most democratic of all the arts in that anyone can take a photograph or has had their picture taken; so accessible that we don’t demand as much and that’s what makes me angry. Even the pace setters and the professionals in the field, the people who define photography themselves never expect more from the medium than that. Szarkowski, it seems to me, feels that the history of photography has already been defined and it’s simply a matter of refining that definition. Photography is not even a hundred and some years old and it’s already this staid, ossified institution. People are still lighting candles under Stieglitz and under Weston’s green pepper, and rightly so, but let’s get on with it! I’ve seen enough of France at the turn of the century! If photography is a viable living art form, it has to change. It should not be threatened by a handful of non-conformists. The real danger to the medium is the photographer still photographing parking lots in California and being heralded a genius."

 

"Don’t worry, nobody has the

beautiful lady, not really, and

nobody has the strange and

hidden power, nobody is

exceptional or wonderful or

magic, they only seem to be

it’s all a trick, an in, a con,

don’t buy it, don’t believe it.

the world is packed with

billions of people whose lives

and deaths are useless and

when one of these jumps up

and the light of history shines

upon them, forget it, it’s not

what it seems, it’s just

another act to fool the fools

again.

 

There are no strong men, there

are no beautiful women.

at least, you can die knowing

this

and you will have

the only possible

victory."

 

"I remember once on the bum in Texas

I watched a crow-blast, one hundred farmers with one hundred shotguns jerking off the sky with a giant penis of hate and the crows came down half-dead, half-living,

and they clubbed them to death to save their shells

but they ran out of shells before they ran out of crows

and the crows came back and walked around the pellets and

stuck out their tongues

and mourned their dead and elected new leaders

and then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap."

 

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible."