15 Quotes By Photographer Emmet Gowin

Photographers - Quotes  Comment
0 Likes

 
Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Emmet Gowin.
“Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.” – Emmet Gowin
“All important pictures embody something that we do not yet understand.” – Emmet Gowin
“The challenge of photography is to show the thing photographed so that our feelings are awakened and hidden aspects are revealed to us.” – Emmet Gowin
“As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise – who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.” – Emmet Gowin
“Of course, this is one of the really important things about art, that you can make more than you can understand at the moment the thing is being made. But the gap between what we recognize inside ourselves – our feelings- and our ability to trust ourselves and to trust exposing ourselves to those ideas, can be great.” – Emmet Gowin
“It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we’re quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that’s useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can’t know exactly what it is we are doing.” – Emmet Gowin
“The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.” – Emmet Gowin
“The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don’t know, or already know and should take seriously.” – Emmet Gowin
“This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.” – Emmet Gowin
“I feel that whatever picture an artist makes it is in part a picture of himself — a matter of identity.” – Emmet Gowin
“What’s great is that the picture is already taken before it goes public. It’s in secret. The trust that develops from such a habit engenders risk, and you realize you’re not as vulnerable as you thought. Once you become comfortable with being more truthful about who you are, the easier it is, the prouder you become. That’s the way it unfolded for us.” – Emmet Gowin
“Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly’s wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, ‘Here I am.’” – Emmet Gowin
“I am pessimistic about a picture’s power to be the emissary of just one thing. What I hope is that the picture says, “Here I am, this is what I am like,” and the person seeing the picture says in return, ‘You know a lot but you don’t know half of what I know.’” – Emmet Gowin
“I was going round the world searching for an interesting place, when I realized that the place that I was in was already interesting.” – Emmet Gowin
“I made 10 times as many images as the other students,” he says of the early years. “I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can’t afford to waste time: take it seriously.” – Emmet Gowin
Read a conversation with Emmet Gowin here.
Watch a video on Emmet Gowin here.
Find more quotes in The Essential Collection Quotes By Photographers.

10 Quotes By Photographer Eliot Porter

Photographers - Quotes  Comment
3 Likes


Enjoy this collection of quotes by Eliot Porter.

“Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera.” – Eliot Porter

“You learn to see by practice. It’s just like playing tennis. You get better the more you play. The more you look around at things. The more you see. The more you photograph. The more you realize what can be photographed and what can’t be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.” – Eliot Porter

“Photographs are believed more than words; thus they can be used persuasively to show people who have never taken the trouble to look what is there.” – Eliot Porter

“Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment…and therefore for the fostering of a healthy human race and even very likely for its survival.” – Eliot Porter

“I don’t think it’s necessary to put your feelings about photography in words. I’ve read things that photographers have written for exhibitions and so forth about their subjective feelings about photography and mostly I think it’s disturbing. I think they’re fooling themselves very often. They’re just talking, they’re not saying anything.” – Eliot Porter

“I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself — for the photograph — without consideration of how it may be used.” – Eliot Porter

“You learn to see by practice. It’s just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can’t be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.” – Eliot Porter

“Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.” – Eliot Porter

“But before all else a work of art is the creation of love. Love for the subject first and for the medium second. Love is the fundamental necessity underlying the need to create, underlying the emotion that gives it form, and from which grows the unfinished product that is presented to the world. Love is the general criterion by which the rare photograph is judged. It must contain it to be not less than the best of which the photographer is capable.” – Eliot Porter

“My emotions, instincts, and interests are all with nature.” – Eliot Porter

“Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. Nature should be viewed without distinction… She makes no choice herself; everything that happens has equal significance. Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake that many people make: They think that half of nature can be destroyed — the uncomfortable half — while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side.” – Eliot Porter

View 1 2 Great Photographs By Eliot Porter.
View a documentary on Eliot Porter here.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.

44 Quotes On Persistence

Creativity - Quotes  Comment
0 Likes

Quotes_Persistence
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on Persistence.
“A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.” – Jim Watkins
“There are two ways of attaining an important end, force and perseverance; the silent power of the latter grows irresistible with time.” – Sophie Swetchine
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” ― Calvin Coolidge
“Energy and persistence conquer all things.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” – Napoleon Hill
“Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.” – Bill Bradley
“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.” ― Thomas A. Edison
“Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.” – John D. Rockefeller
Read More

12 Quotes By Photographer John Pfahl

Photographers - Quotes  Comment
0 Likes

 
Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer John Pfahl.
“People think the camera steals their soul. Places, I am convinced, are affected in the opposite direction. The more they are photographed (or drawn and painted) the more soul they seem to accumulate.” – John Pfahl
“It would have been possible to structure my photographs in such a way that no indicators of the present were discernible. However, I wanted to incorporate into the project as a whole the jostling of time-frames I would feel as I set up my tripod on various rocky promontories.” – John Pfahl
“I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search …” – John Pfahl
“Somehow I felt that if Fox Talbot had had more time and more drawing talent, he would have filled in the interval between his two drawings and made a complete panorama. Now, 163 years later, I was able to use his great invention to elaborate on his youthful dream of capturing and fixing the fleeting image. In doing so, I may also have added another little bit to the soul of this extraordinary place.” – John Pfahl
“I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today’s viewers.” – John Pfahl
“Photography, of course, is the perfect medium for the investigation. It can reveal the truth of present day specifics and particularities, while at the same time, by conscious choice of lighting and pictorial structure, suggest the aesthetic legacy of the past.” – John Pfahl
“It is not without trepidation that I have appropriated the codes of “the Sublime” and “the Picturesque” in my work. After all, serious photographers have spent most of this century trying to expunge such extravagances from their art. The tradition lives on, mostly in calendars and picture postcards. I was challenged to rework and revitalize that which had been so roundly denigrated.” – John Pfahl
“While making my “picture window” photographs, I came to think that every room was like a gigantic camera forever pointed at the same view.”” – John Pfahl
“Strangers with puzzled looks were amazingly cooperative in letting me into their rooms with my photographic gear. They let me take down the curtains, wash the windows, and rearrange the furniture. Often, too, they expressed their desire to share their view with others, as if it were a non-depletable treasure.
I liked the idea that my photographic vantage points were not solely determined by myself. They were predetermined by others, sometimes years earlier, and patiently waited for me to discover them.” – John Pfahl
“As Estelle Jussim wrote, it is almost impossible for a single photograph to state both the problem and the solution.” – John Pfahl
“I became wary of simple interpretations that assumed fixed and final meanings.” – John Pfahl
“I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely. I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route.” – John Pfahl
Find out more about John Pfahl here.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.

11 Quotes By Hiroshi Sugimoto

Photographers - Quotes  Comment
0 Likes

Enjoy this collection of quotes by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

“My method is different from the one most photographers use. I do not go around and shoot. I usually have a specific vision, just by myself. One night I thought of taking a photographic exposure of a film at a movie theater while the film was being projected. I imagined how it could be possible to shoot an entire movie with my camera. Then I had the clear vision that the movie screen would show up on the picture as a white rectangle. I thought it could look like a very brilliant white rectangle coming out from the screen, shining throughout the whole theater. It might seem very interesting and mysterious, even in some way religious.” – Hiroshi Sugimoto

“Fossils work almost the same way as photography… as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.” – Hiroshi Sugimoto

“When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth.” – Hiroshi Sugimoto

“People have been reading photography as a true document, at the same time they are now getting suspicious. I am basically an honest person, so I let the camera capture whatever it captures… whether you believe it or not is up to you; it’s not my responsibility, blame my camera, not me.” – Hiroshi Sugimoto

“Humans have changed the landscape so much, but images of the sea could be shared with primordial people. I just project my imagination on to the viewer, even the first human being. I think first and then imagine some scenes. Then I go out and look for them. Or I re-create these images with my camera. I love photography because photography is the most believable medium. Painting can lie, but photography never lies: that is what people used to believe.” – Hiroshi Sugimoto

“It’s pre-photography, a fossilization of time, … Americans have done the Zen garden to death. I wanted to do something different.”

“I didn’t want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art—I still see this.” – Hiroshi Sugimoto

“If I already have a vision, my work is almost done. The rest is a technical problem.” – Hiroshi Sugimoto

“Art is technique: a means by which to materialize the invisible realm of the mind.” — Hiroshi Sugimoto

“I’m inviting the spirits into my photography. It’s an act of God.” – Hiroshi Sugimoto

“Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention―and yet they vouchsafe our very existence. The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there water and air. Living
phenomena spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light, though that could just as easily suggest random coincidence as a Deity. Let’s just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right istance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly  inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example. Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.” – Hiroshi Sugimoto

View 12 Great Photographs By Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Find out more about Hiroshi Sugimoto here.

Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.

44 Quotes On Community

Creativity - Quotes  Comment
0 Likes

Quotes_Community
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on Community.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” ― John Donne
“One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.” – Herman Melville
“While the spirit of neighborliness was important on the frontier because neighbors were so few, it is even more important now because our neighbors are so many.” – Lady Bird Johnson
“We’re losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person’s mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point. Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanizes what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.” – Vincent Nichols
“Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.” – Rollo May
“I was taken by the power that savoring a simple cup of coffee can have to connect people and create community.” – Howard Schultz
“Each of us is a being in himself and a being in society, each of us needs to understand himself and understand others, take care of others and be taken care of himself.” – Haniel Clark Long
“Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.” ― Orson Scott Card
“I’m a reflection of the community.” – Tupac Shakur
“A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living.” – Rudolf Steiner
“We are called to be strong companions and clear mirrors to one another, to seek those who reflect with compassion and a keen eye how we are doing, whether we seem centered or off course … we need the nourishing company of others to create the circle needed for growth, freedom and healing.” – Wayne Muller Read More

40 Quotes On Perfection

Creativity - Quotes  Comment
0 Likes

Quotes_Perfection
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on perfection.
“They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.” – Winston Churchill
“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” – Vince Lombardi
“Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.” – William Ellery Channing
“Great sculptors and artists spend countless hours perfecting their talents. They don’t pick up a chisel or a brush and palette, expecting immediate perfection. They understand that they will make many errors as they learn, but they start with the basics, the key fundamentals first.” – Joseph B. Wirthlin
“Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.” – Martha Graham
“Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.” – Voltaire
“Perfection is the child of time.” – Joseph Hall
“Perfection is immutable. But for things imperfect, change is the way to perfect them.” – Owen Feltham
“It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection.” – Oscar Wilde
“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.” – J. D. Salinger Read More

15 Quotes By Photographer Josef Koudelka

Photographers - Quotes  Comment
0 Likes

 
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by Josef Koudelka.
“What matters most to me is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.” – Josef Koudelka
“I am not interested in repetition. I don’t want to reach the point from where I wouldn’t know how to go further. It’s good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed.” – Josef Koudelka
“If I am dissatisfied, it’s simply because good photos are few and far between. A good photo is a miracle.” – Josef Koudelka
“I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not ‘photographing’, in order to keep the eye in practice.” – Josef Koudelka
“Sometimes I photograph without looking through the viewfinder. I have mastered that well enough, it is almost as if I were looking through it.” – Josef Koudelka
“When I photograph, I do not think much. If you looked at my contacts you would ask yourself: “What is this guy doing?” But I keep working with my contacts and with my prints, I look at them all the time. I believe that the result of this work stays in me and at the moment of photographing it comes out, without my thinking of it.” – Josef Koudelka
“I don’t pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.” – Josef Koudelka
“I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily.” – Josef Koudelka
“I don’t like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.” – Josef Koudelka
“I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.” – Josef Koudelka
“My photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers… They say, ‘We came to liberate you….’ I say: ‘Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.’ They say: No. We never… no shooting. No. No.’ So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say, ‘Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.’ And they have to believe me.” – Josef Koudelka
“The changes taking place in this part of Europe are enormous and very rapid. One world is disappearing. I am trying to photograph what’s left. I have always been drawn to what is ending, what will soon no longer exist.” – Josef Koudelka
“It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It’s important that I take them. There were periods where I didn’t have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: ‘Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.’ I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: ‘Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,’ I would have refused.” – Josef Koudelka
“When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, “Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer.” – Josef Koudelka
“I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.” – Josef Koudelka
View 12 Great Photographs By Josef Koudelka.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers here.

47 Quotes By Photographer Chuck Close

Photographers - Quotes  Comment
0 Likes

 
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by artist Chuck Close.
“I don’t work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.” – Chuck Close
“Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it’s not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.” – Chuck Close
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.” ― Chuck Close
“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.” – Chuck Close
“I’m not by nature a terribly intuitive person; I need to build a situation in which I will behave more intuitively, and that has really changed the life of my work – I found a way to trick myself into being intuitive.” – Chuck Close
“I was never one of those people who had to have a perfect situation to paint in. I can make art anywhere, anytime — it doesn’t matter. I mean, I know so many artists for whom having the perfect space is somehow essential. They spend years designing, building, outfitting the perfect space, and then when it is just about time to get to work they’ll sell that place and build another one. It seems more often than not a way to keep from having to work. But I could paint anywhere. I made big paintings in the tiniest bedrooms, garages, you name it. you know, once I have my back to the room, I could be anywhere.” – Chuck Close
“On a typical country day I am painting by nine, and I usually work until noon. Three hours in the morning. I will have lunch either at my desk, or if it’s nice I will go to the pool. Of if it’s really nice I will go to the beach for an hour. Have lunch on the beach perhaps, and then I come back and I paint from one to four, another three hours, and about then the light is failing, and I am beginning to fuck up. So then my nurse usually comes at four, and I stop working, clean up, have a big drink, and that’s a typical day. I work every day out there, every single day.” – Chuck Close
“Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.” ― Chuck Close
“All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.” – Chuck Close
“Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.” ― Chuck Close
“See, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to [participate in] ‘problem creation’ … You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome — which I think is a more interesting place to be.” – Chuck Close
“Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own.” ― Chuck Close
“Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.” – Chuck Close
“If it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody else’s art.” – Chuck Close
“I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine… Most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect.” – Chuck Close
“Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It’s the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.” – Chuck Close
“A photograph doesn’t gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It’s frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.” – Chuck Close
“What difference does it make whether you’re looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.” – Chuck Close
“The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter – 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.” – Chuck Close
“Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don’t get a photograph that I want to work from.” – Chuck Close
“A face is a road map of someone’s life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there’s a great deal that’s communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been.” – Chuck Close
“I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don’t recognize faces, so I’m sure it’s what drove me to portraits in the first place.” – Chuck Close
“I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.” – Chuck Close
“There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it’s just phenomenal. There’s also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation between left-handedness and learning disabilities.” – Chuck Close
“I’m very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.” – Chuck Close
“Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.” – Chuck Close
“Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.” – Chuck Close
“Painting is a lie. It’s the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.” – Chuck Close
“Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that’s embedded in the work.” – Chuck Close
“I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.” – Chuck Close
“It’s always a pleasure to talk about someone else’s work.” – Chuck Close
“In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.” – Chuck Close
“I build a painting by putting little marks together – some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.” – Chuck Close
“I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won’t be able to give much information about who it is.” – Chuck Close
“I can’t always reach the image in my mind… almost never, in fact… so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.” – Chuck Close
“There’s something Zen-like about the way I work – it’s like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.” – Chuck Close
“I knew from the age of five what I wanted to do. The one thing I could do was draw. I couldn’t draw that much better than some of the other kids, but I cared more and I wanted it badly.” – Chuck Close
“Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you’re in trouble.” – Chuck Close
“You know, the way art history is taught, often there’s nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.” – Chuck Close
“It doesn’t upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.” – Chuck Close
“I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.” – Chuck Close
“Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they’re very narrow.” – Chuck Close
“The reason I don’t like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.” – Chuck Close
“In life you can be dealt a winning hand of cards and you can find a way to lose, and you can be dealt a losing hand and find a way to win. True in art and true in life: you pretty much make your own destiny. If you are by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a better position to be lucky in life.” ― Chuck Close
“Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions.” – Chuck Close
“If the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.” – Chuck Close
“Art saved my life” ― Chuck Close
Find the book Chuck Close Photographer here.
Explore The Essential Collection of Quotes By Photographers here.
View The Essential Collection Of Photographers Documentaries here.
 
 

43 Quotes On Innovation

Creativity - Quotes  Comment
0 Likes

Quotes_Innovation
Enjoy this collection of my favorite quotes on innovation.
“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” — Theodore Levitt
“Innovation is creativity with a job to do.” – John Emmerling
“Imagination plus innovation equals realization.” – Denis Waitley
“Ideas are useless unless used.” – T. Levitt
“Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.” – Alfred North Whitehead
“To accomplish great things we must dream as well as act.” – Anatole France
“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iaccocca
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” – William Pollard
“Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter
“One of the challenges of innovation is figuring out how to wipe your mind clean about what you should be doing at any given moment, and not having a religious attachment to what’s gotten you there thus far.” – Andrew Mason
“Everybody believes in innovation until they see it. Then they think, ‘Oh, no; that’ll never work. It’s too different.’” – Nolan Bushnell
“Innovation is hard. It really is. Because most people don’t get it. Remember, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, these were all considered toys at their introduction because they had no constituency. They were too new.” – Nolan Bushnell
“The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.” – Kevin Kelly
“An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.” – Max Planck
“For better or worse, that is true with any new innovation, certainly any new technological innovation. There’s many good things that come out of it, but also some bad things. All you can do is try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff.” – Steve Case
“We seem to forget that innovation doesn’t just come from equations or new kinds of chemicals, it comes from a human place. Innovation in the sciences is always linked in some way, either directly or indirectly, to a human experience.” – John Maeda
“For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.” – Margaret Heffernan
“Innovation is all about people. Innovation thrives when the population is diverse, accepting and willing to cooperate.” – Vivek Wadhwa
“Societies advance through innovation every bit as much as economies do.” – Geoff Mulgan
“If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.” – Steven Johnson
“Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.” – Bill Gates
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – Steve Jobs
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” – Steve Jobs
“You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.” – Larry Page
“Most companies don’t have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.” – Gary Hamel
“I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.” – Jeff Bezos
“Innovation is the ability to convert ideas into invoices.” – L Duncan
“Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.” – Michael Porter
“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” – Peter Drucker
“The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present the decline will be fast.” – Peter Drucker
“Do you know what my favorite renewable fuel is? An ecosystem for innovation.” – Thomas Friedman
“Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.” – Bill Gates
“Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.” – Jill Lepore
“A key ingredient in innovation is the ability to challenge authority and break rules.” – Vivek Wadhwa
“Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public.” – Ludwig von Mises
“Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.” – Ferran Adria
“We must not confuse distortion with innovation; distortion is useless change, art is beneficial change.” – Chuck Jones
“Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn’t mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.” – Evgeny Morozov
“Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something and it doesn’t work and it takes confidence to say we haven’t failed yet … Ultimately you become commercially successful.” – Clayton Christensen
“There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.” – Brene Brown
“Pure innovation is more gross than error.” – George Chapman
“We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.” – Gary Hamel
“Time is the greatest innovator.” — Sir Francis Bacon
Find more quotes in The Essential List Of Creativity Quotes.