Photographers From The United States

"Being a successful inventor, starts with being curious, and asking the right questions."

"Trying to assess the true importance and function of the Internet now, is like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk if they were aware of the potential of American Airlines AAdvantage miles."

"Most products are ugly. The harsh reality is that in many of these markets, form follows funding. And that products go where the market takes them."

"A ‘good 10 percent’ of American products comes out of big-idea organizations that don’t believe in talking to the customer. They’re run by passionate maniacs who make everybody's life miserable until they get what they want."

"The Internet represents the greatest story telling technology since the development of language. It will be far more important than reading and writing as a purposeful tool. Everything that is enabled by story telling will be enabled by the Internet."

"Vibrant companies must put together five-year plans. But they must be willing to change these five-year plans every single year."

"It's disgraceful and embarrassing that the highest technology in a typical inner city high school in this country is the metal detector the students pass through at the front door."

"The technology needed for an early Internet-connection implant is no more than 25 years off. Imagine that you could understand any language, remember every joke, solve any equation, get the latest news, balance your checkbook, communicate with others, and have near-instant access to any book ever published, without ever having to leave the privacy of yourself."

"In 250 years, reading and writing will have turned out to be a fad."

"“The Net, I guarantee you, really is fire. I think it’s more important than the invention of movable type.”"

"[Visionaries] not only believed that the impossible can be done, but that it must be done."

"There's no Bits, like Show Bits"

"Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet."

"[On the need for ultra high definition television] The problem with television isn't the number of horizontal scanning lines. It's the lines of dialogue spoken by the actors."

"Tom Savini Explains The Enduring Appeal of Zombies, In Film and On TV (March 14, 2014)"

"I make sure that they photograph everything they do. And they have to have a portfolio to graduate. You know, there’s no formula for success out there, but what works is: learn how [to photograph], photograph everything you do and you put those photographs in front of people that can help hire you. That works."

"Love stories—yeah, there’s something about them. I cry when somebody does something good for somebody, not something horrible. I avoid all the horrible stuff. But to me, when a human being is sincerely generous, or kind or overly helpful to another human being, that’s when I tear up. I just love the idea of love."

"I love CGI when it’s done well. It may sound strange coming from me, because if you watch my stuff in movies it’s happening right in front of you, but I wish we had CGI back then to solve some problems. Getting rid of an edge or enhancing stuff, which is what they have today. I love it when it’s done well."

"We started shooting the film before they'd even come up with a working model of King Kong, it wasn't unusual for the wardrobe to be decided on the day before a scene was going to be shot - usually those things are worked out months in advance. We had a veteran crew, and our cameraman, Harold Wellman, had actually worked on the original 'King Kong' in 1933. It was my first movie, of course, and people would take me aside and tell me that no matter how many more movies I made, I'd never make another one like this"

"When I think back on Kong, that was like difficult too, because there was no reality in making that movie. There was so much that was left to my own devices and imagination. And when I had to play a scene opposite a 45-foot ape, that was bit taxing on your imagination because obviously there was nothing there, you know."

"Fundamentally, the camera is nothing more than a light-tight box, having an arrangement for holding a light-sensitive substance (plate or film) and a device (lens or pinhole) for projecting on this sensitive substance an image of objects external to the camera."

"I believe that animals have rights which, although different from our own, are just as inalienable. I believe animals have the right not to have pain, fear or physical deprivation inflicted upon them by us. Even if they are on the way to the slaughterhouse, animals have the right to food and water and shelter if it is needed. They have the right not to be brutalized in any way as food resources, for entertainment or any other purpose. … Finding a substitute for animals in research has only recently become an imperative in the scientific community. … One day animals will not be used in the laboratory. How soon that day comes depends on how soon people stop screaming and make the search for alternatives a major research imperative. As long as conferences on the subject sound like feeding time in the monkey house, monkeys along with millions of other animals are going to stay right where they are now — in the laboratory."

"For Twombly, the first thing is the line. It is something deliberately artificial and artistic. He has worked on his line, has made it supple enough to convey form, pace, depth and much else besides (Catlo Huber). The line, which Paul Klee called a path, a guide through the imaginary territory of the picture, becomes in Twombly's hands, a vibrant, autonomous, complex 'self' and 'other' that roams through wider and wider landscapes, spaces and processes. Or, as Twombly himself says: each line is the present expedience of its own inherent history.."

"The curator [Varnedoe] somewhat underplays the vast impact of Twombly's early relationship with Rauschenberg.. .Varnedoe reminds us that the two artists met in the spring of 1951 after Twombly moved to New York and entered classes at the Art Students league, where the slightly older Rauschenberg [born in 1925] was also enrolled. Varnedoe maintains that it was probably Twombly who turned Rauschenberg on to Schwitters, rather than vice versa. But it was clearly Rauschenberg who convinced Twombly to join him at Black Mountain College in North Carolina for the summer of 1951. At Black Mountain the young artist was exposed to the teachings not only of Ben Shahn, whom he emulated in his spindly graphic style, and Robert Motherwell, who was one of his strongest early defenders and wrote the first catalogue essay about him, but John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Charles Olson and Franz Kline.[2] A certain Cagean sense of flux, together with a kind of I Ching-influenced orientalism, would remain an undercurrent in Twombly's work, distancing it from the more purposeful and willfully heroic strokes of the Abstract Expressionists."

"But on longer consideration the artist's role [of Twombly] as teacher can be seen as part of his ivory-tower position, a stance of highly selective accessibility that he has cultivated over the years. Since the late '50s younger artists have sought him out in Rome, including Jannis Kounellis in the late '50s, Alighiero e Boetti in the late '60s and Francesco Clemente in the '70s. Brice Marden, having worked for Rauschenberg in the '60s, was early drawn into the Twombly circle. In the early '80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Donald Baechler, James Brown, Julian Schnabel and w:Terry Winters all learned much from his art. (Twombly will reportedly appear in the same area as [Terry] Winters and [Brice] Marden in the 1995 Whitney Biennial.) Ross Bleckner's signature '80s image of chandeliers doubles back to Twombly's lost chandelier paintings of the early '50s, which Rauschenberg described in an interview with Barbara Rose. Both Philip Taaffe and Michele Zalopany followed Twombly's expatriate steps to Italy, where they became friends of the artist. In the '90s Suzanne McClelland [see A.i.A., Oct. '94] and Pat Steir each defined her stance in relation to his work. Thus at least three generations of very different artists have studied at the 'School of Twombly'."

"It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks.. .So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks.. .And I did those charts, big palettes.. .two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task."

"To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical. Gorky, who is very passionate, can copy a drawing or take a drawing and copy it exactly as a painting, and Miro can too, it's amazing. Miro can do a drawing to paint and that's another training in a sense. So there's a certain mannerism that comes in both of them [three], and probably everything becomes obvious in time. But I don't have that. The line is illustrated or the colour. I'm sure it has great feeling when they're doing it, but it's more towards defining something. It has a certain clarity because it's a complex thing. I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don't have to think about it. So I don't think of composition; I don’t think of colour here and there. Sometimes I alter something after. So all I could think is the rush.. .I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It's like a state."

"It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture. So I've never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking.. .I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I'm not thinking about the painting, I'm thinking about the subject. Lots of times I'll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I'm working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can't seem to do it. And everything slowed down."

"And I am very happy to have the boat motif because, when I grew up, in summer with my parents we were always in Massachusetts, and I was always by the sea. You know, sometimes little boys love cars, but I had a particular passion for boats, and now I live by the sea. For sure, it is a passage, but it's also very fascinating for lots of things. When you get interested in something you can find out a lot about things. You might meet people who are interested in one subject or another, like they collect palms. I've found people from all over the world who were fanatical about palms, which you wouldn't know unless you were interested in palms. And the sea: because, if you've noticed, the sea is white three quarters of the time, just white – early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue, because the haze is gone. The Mediterranean [where Twombly is living later in his life], at least – the Atlantic is brown – is just always white, white, white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a lighter white.. .Not because I paint it white; I'd have painted it white even if it wasn't, but I am always happy that I might have. It's something that has other consciousness behind it."

"I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you can't be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that; it's impossible, that's the first thing you should know."

"I've found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for or something. Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn't become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it. You tend to be nostalgic. And I think about my boats. It's more complicated than that, but also it's going out and also there's a lot of references to crossing over. But the thing of the Nile boat in Winter's Passage: Luxor was about the wonderful thing, the lazy thing, of being two or three months in Luxor by the river. It was just that, it explains a winter passage. From a certain point to the other side: it's like the Greek boat that ferries you over to the other world. That sculpture didn't have it. But sometimes the large painting in Houston does have it. It's a passage through everything."

"Cy Twombly was the first [artist], Robert Rauschenberg shared ideas with]. But Cy and I were not critical. I did my work and he did his. Cy's direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact."

"I show things in flux."

"I respond to the Greek love of metamorphosis."

"I work in waves because I'm impatient. It has to be done. I take liberties."

"I think of myself as a Romantic Symbolist."

"For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)."

"In painting it is the forming of the image."

"Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957]."

"When I work I work very fast, but preparing the work can take any length."

"To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release.By crisis by no means limited to a morbid state, but could just as easily be an ecstatic impulse."

"I'm drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements."

"Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape.. .All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it.. .And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense."

"By definition, a catalogue raissonne employs methodical scholarship to gather and digest in systematic form all that can be known of an artist's work and life. In short the evidence of his intellectual and cultural life."

"I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others — perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also, it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph. My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished."

"Black and white are the colors of photography. To me, they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. Most of my photographs are of people; they are seen simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street. There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough—there has to be vision and the two together can make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe this thin line where matter ends and mind begins."

"People are my favourite subject because there are no two alike, so my work never becomes routine."

"Photography is more than a means of recording the obvious. It is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever, whether it be a face or a flower, a place or a thing, a day or a moment. The camera is a perfect companion. It makes no demands, imposes no obligations. It becomes your notebook and your reference library, your microscope and your telescope. It sees what you are too lazy or too careless to notice, and it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything."

"Life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference and it is important to see what is invisible to others."

"Then, one afternoon he turned me [Stieglitz, in 1941] loose, alone, among the several boxes of [his photo-series:] 'w:Equivalents'. He had learned to trust me.. ..A couple of hours later I came out in tears. I had been through a tremendous experience. It was like the thunderstorm I felt in my head once in Paris.. ..Music has done this to me many times, but though I already deeply loved photographs, nothing like this had happened to me before.. .Stieglitz, amused and compassionate, waited until I could speak.."