“The first step – especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money – the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

“A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.”

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”

“Every woman is just a different kind of problem.”

- Chuck Palahniuk

“Michelangelo’s ‘unsociableness’ has been seen as the typical attitude of what was known in the Renaissance as the vir melanchonicus, or the absorbed and solitary contemplator, wholly wrapped up in his art, for whom involvement in creative activity was transformed into suffering:”

“I am here in great distress and with great physical strain, and have no friends of any kind, nor do I want them; and I do not have enough time to eat as much as I need; my joy and my sorrow, my repose are these discomforts.”

- Michelangelo

“As a writer looking at the art of photography, I just couldn’t help but draw analogies to quantum mechanics—the fact that the world exists as something that on its own is essentially undefined, until a photographer comes along with his camera to observe it and, through that observation, to give it meaning. Horribly, I’ve even gone further, wondering whether my observation of the photographic act was in fact changing the nature of the art. It’s a really seductive line of thought, and there are times when I thought it explained everything about how photography has affected the world.”

- David Schonauer

http://stateoftheart.popphoto.com

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

-Gustave Flaubert

“There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can’t give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don’t learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.”

- Imogen Cunningham

Kearny Street, Legs At The Crosswalk, San Francisco, California. July 2007.

This Image Is Available For Purchase At RedBubble.

“I hate flowers – I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.”

-Georgia O’Keeffe

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

- William Wordsworth

A photographer must be prepared to catch and hold on to those elements which give distinction to the subject or lend it atmosphere. They are often momentary, chance-sent things: a gleam of light on water, a trail of smoke from a passing train, a cat crossing a threshold, the shadows cast by a setting sun. Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates. Leaving out of question the deliberately posed or arranged photograph, it is usually some incidental detail that heightens the effect of a picture – stressing a pattern, deepening the sense of atmosphere. But the photographer must be able to recognize instantly such effects.

- Bill Brandt

Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews – talking, and listening, and looking, looking. … And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole. – Aaron Siskind

The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.

- Beaumont Newhall

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

- George Bernard Shaw

Self Portrait, hotel room, Seaside, California. June 2007.
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There are many forms of photography. I consider myself simply a recorder of that which I find of interest around me. I personally have no desire to create or stage direct ideas. – David Hurn