Photographers From The United States

"The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one."

"People say New York is a melting pot, but it's really not. It's this mosaic of all these different cultures that really don't understand each other very well."

"I know how to tell a story, but there’s a deeper thing I’m trying to get to now that can’t be expressed with a caption."

"The world's problems are pressing in on us all. The scale and impact of human activities now affects a great portion of the global resources important to human welfare. These activities are putting growing, often destructive pressure on the global environment, pressure that appears likely to increase as human numbers swell toward the doubling of the world's population that evidently lies ahead. These pressures can spawn or aggravate conflict that. in a world with so much destructive weaponry, generates important national security problems. Great changes are necessary to help ensure a humane future for the generations to come. Most of the world's scientific community and many people in the environmental movement are aware of the gravity of the problems. Yet despite sober warnings from these and other groups, in both the industrial and the developing world, re- medial efforts frequently appear powerless and ineffectual. The scientific community has not taken a sustained, powerful role in the public arena where this great cluster of issues is debated and where the problems must be resolved. There is much more that our community can contribute to assessment, warning, and proposals for new patterns of behavior."

"While science and technology play critical roles in sustaining modern civilization, they are not part of our culture in the sense that they are not commonly studied or well comprehended. Neither the potential nor the limitations of science are understood so that what can be achieved and what is beyond reach are not comprehended. The line between science and magic becomes blurred so that public judgments on technical issues can be erratic or badly flawed. It frequently appears that some people will believe almost anything. Thus judgments can be manipulated or warped by unscrupulous groups. Distortions or outright falsehoods can come to be accepted as fact."

"All we who can gauge the threats can do is soldier on, exploiting what tools we have, gaining as much ground as time permits: seizing issues when they are ripe, remaining patient and careful with facts, even when faced with relentless and reckless opposition, mounting sustained campaigns and avoiding simple shots across the bow, combining solid analysis with persistent outreach and public education, touching people as widely as we can, and, as Winston Churchill emphasized, never giving up. Many of us in science understand well what the costs of inattention and lack of care will be. … Yet neither we nor others have yet caught the sustained attention of our fellow humans, and, until we do, the world cannot escape from its troubles . Thus the deepest question before us all is: How will our species reach the understanding and gain the political will to alter the prospects on the horizon? No one now has the answer to that need. It is indeed a distant light."

"What should thoughtful people do? Are there means to brighten future prospects in the face of such human myopia and stubbornness? There are many in the scientific community whose views are bleak. One biologist, speaking to me many years ago, remarked that many of his colleagues thought of the behavior of the human race as similar to a one-celled animal's. Such an animal may extend a pseudopod in search of food; if hurt or blocked, it pulls back, but otherwise its activity continues, mindlessly, without understanding, without end. With larger perils unperceived, it can destroy itself."

"We are immersed in one of the most significant revolutions in man's history. The force that drives this revolution is not social dissension or political ideology, but relentless exploitations of scientific knowledge. There is no prospect that this revolution will subside; on the contrary, it will continue to transform profoundly our modes of living and dying. That many of these transformations have been immeasurably beneficial goes without saying. But, as with all revolutions, the technological revolution has released destructive forces, and our society has failed to cope with them. Thus we have become addicted to an irrational and perilous arms race, and we are unable to protect our natural environment from destruction."

"Distortion and false statements have a sturdy history in public discourse. Neither the government nor large organizations can be depended on to support their objectives honestly and with integrity. Replying in kind turns out not to be an option, not just to retain scientific integrity but for practical reasons. Critics, whether individuals or public interest groups, cannot afford to slant the truth, ever. Scientists are far more vulnerable to the consequences of their own ill-considered words than are laypeople, owing to the care and integrity that is believed to characterize the scientific approach to problems. Intentional distortions are almost always uncovered and the purveyors pilloried without mercy. It may not be forgotten for years and surfaces over and over again. So too will honest mistakes which, along with even minor exaggerations, are seized on and exploited mercilessly. Not a bad rule — one that I and some colleagues observe — is to pull back a bit in most argument. Not only should one never distort nor exaggerate, it is best, I believe, to understate."

"Painting, which is essentially a rhythmic harmony of coloured spaces."

"This man has one dominating idea..to fill space in a beautiful way."

"Art is the most valued thing in the world...it is the expression of the highest form of human energy,the creative power nearest to the divine.The power is within - the question is how to reach it."

"Ten Practical Experiments"

"Great art should come from the harmony of two lines."

"Realism was the death of art."

"..art lies in the fine choice. The artist does not teach us to see facts: he teaches us to feel harmonies."

"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."

"We live not only inside a body but within a story as well, and our story resides in the land as sure as the vision of Dorothea Lange's desperate, running horse."

"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it."

"You put your camera around your neck in the morning, along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."

"[Do you have a motto or creed that as an artist you live by?] Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great "art idea". And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you'll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere."

"Man Ray is a youthful alchemist forever in quest of the painter's philosopher's stone. May he never find it, as that would bring an end to his experimentations which are the very condition of living art expression."

"[Man Ray was] a kind of short man who looked a little like Mister Peepers, spoke slowly with a slight Brooklynese accent, and talked so you could never tell when he was kidding."

"Man Ray, n.m. synon. de Joie jouer jouir. (Translation: "Man Ray, masculine noun, synonymous with joy, to play, to enjoy.")"

"With him you could try anything—there was nothing you were told not to do, except spill the chemicals. With Man Ray, you were free to do what your imagination conjured, and that kind of encouragement was wonderful."

"It's a Man Ray kind of sky, Let me show you what I can do with it."

"Don't put my name on it. These are simply documents I make."

"You see, I try to walk the tightrope of accomplishment between the chasms of notoriety and oblivion."

"I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions. Quoted in PBS episode of American Masters"

"unconcerned but not indifferent"

"I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor."

"l paint what cannot be photographed, and l photograph what l do not wish to paint. lf it is a portrait that interests me, a face, or a nude, I will use my camera. It is quicker than making a drawing or a painting. But if it is something I cannot photograph, like a dream or a subconscious impulse I have to resort to drawing or painting. To express what I feel I use the medium best suited to express that idea, which is also always the most economical one. l am not at all interested in being consistent as a painter, and object-maker or a photographer. I can use several different techniques, like the old masters who were engineers, musicians and poets at the same time. I have never shared the contempt shown by painters for photography: there is no competition involved, painting and photography are two media engaged in different paths. There is no conflict between the two."

"An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an original is motivated by necessity. The original is the result of an automatic process, the reproduction, of a mechanical process. In other words: Inspiration then information; each validates the other. All other considerations are beyond the scope of these statements. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human."

"All critics should be assassinated."

"Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask "how", while others of a more curious nature will ask "why". Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information."

"A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him."

"There is … your high bridge in Pasadena from which every once in a while someone jumps off, committing suicide. There is no question of removing the bridge. Poems have been written by well-known authors that are supposed to have driven love-sick young people to suicide. These works are not banned. Thousands lose their lives in automobile accidents, yet nothing is done to restrain manufacturers from building lethal instruments that can do more than 30 miles an hour. To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society. An unskilled cook or doctor can put our lives in danger. l have tried … to paint a picture that would, like the beautiful head of Medusa, turn the spectator to stone … so that certain ones who looked at it would drop dead … but l have not yet succeeded!"

"There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it."

"It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them."

"One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy."

"I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself."

"Throughout time painting has alternately been put to the service of the Church, the State, arms, individual patronage, scientific phenomena, anecdote and decoration … all the marvelous works that have been painted, whatever the sources of inspiration, still live for us because of absolute qualities they possess in common. The creative force and the expressiveness of painting reside materially in the colour and texture of pigments, in the possibilities of form invention and organisation, and in the flat plane on which these elements are brought into play."

"Just because you are lucky does not mean you make good choices."

"A lot of people can forget about you in Los Angeles."

"Adapt and overcome."

"You have a moral obligation to finish the job you said you would do."

"There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever."

"Julie won a scholarship to Harvard. Graduated with honors and received another scholarship to Boston University Medical School. Julie became a medical doctor, alas, losing her medical license to a terrible addiction to heroin. As an ex-addict, she now manages Autoworld Go Carts in West Covina, California. She has the highest score on PacMan... Go Julie!!!"

"The whole world is a scab. The point is to pick it constructively."

"You know what they say - the sweetest word in the English language is revenge."