Walker Evans Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Believe, Quality

  Walker Evans, Maria Morris Hambourg, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2000). “Walker Evans”, p.131, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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• I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Men, Definitions

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• It's too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else... I equate that with propaganda; I think that's a lower rank of purpose.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Thinking, Purpose

  Thomas Southall, Walker Evans, James Agee, Friends of Photography, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art (1990). “Of time & place: Walker Evans and William Christenberry”, Friends of Photography Bookstore

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• What America needs is a political revolution.

  Walker Evans

  Political Revolution, America, Needs

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• Science has rolled its war wagons over the crushed myths of so many religious beliefs. It has marshaled its mechanics to explain the motions of the sun, moon, and stars. It has mapped the heavens, leaving no place for gods to live.

  Walker Evans

  Religious, Stars, War

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• I began to wonder - I knew I was an artist or wanted to be one - but I was wondering whether I really was an artist. I was doing such ordinary things that I could feel the difference. Most people would look at those things and say, 'Well, that's nothing. What did you do that for? That's just a wreck of a car or a wreck of a man. That's nothing. That isn't art.' They don't say that anymore.

  Walker Evans

  Art, Men, Differences

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• ... nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Thinking, Looks

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• I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Men, Thinking

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• Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens.

  Walker Evans

  Color, Bebop, Poison

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• Privilege, if you're very strict, is an immoral and unjust thing to have, but if you've got it you didn't choose to get it and you might as well use it. You're privileged to be at Yale, but you know you're under an obligation to repay what's been put into you.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Yale, Use

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• I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Fall, Government

  Thomas Southall, Walker Evans, James Agee, Friends of Photography, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art (1990). “Of time & place: Walker Evans and William Christenberry”, Friends of Photography Bookstore

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• Nobody should touch a Polaroid [camera] until he's over sixty

  Walker Evans

  Cameras, Should, Polaroids

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• I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Men, People

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• It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Dream, Real

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• Science has discovered much. The engineering is wonderful, epicycles and all. And yet, as we look at this vast, elaborate structure built on layer and layer of complex constituents, can we help but be reminded of the Land of Oz. Have we found the Emerald City? Is this what we were searching for? Is this the ultimate fabric of reality? Is this all there is?

  Walker Evans

  Science, Reality, Engineering

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• When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Art, Real

  Jeff Rosenheim, Walker Evans, Jane Ninas, Historic New Orleans Collection (1991). “Walker Evans and Jane Ninas in New Orleans, 1935-1936”, Historic New Orleans

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