I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
All creation is in the art of seeing.
All publicity works upon anxiety.
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
Today the discredit of words is very great.
I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase. For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together.
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal.
Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion.
At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.