Ben Maddow quotes

I feel certain that the largest part of all photographs ever taken or being taken or ever to be taken, is and will continue to be, portraits. This is not only true, it is also necessary. We are not solitary mammals, like the elephant, the whale and the ape. What is most profoundly felt between us, even if hidden, will reappear in our portraits of one another.
-- Ben Maddow

#Taken #Whales #Elephants

The persistent problem in photography is how to look at it.
-- Ben Maddow

#Photography #Looks #Problem

The slice of time has become enormous in importance, and its hidden meaning is now perfectly plain, though so complex that it can hardly be written down.
-- Ben Maddow

#Enormous #Importance #Hidden Meaning

Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one's all right, he turns legit.
-- Ben Maddow

#Trust #Thinking #Noir

Put in hours and hours of planning, figure everything down to the last detail, then what? Burglar alarms start going off all overthe place for no sensible reason. A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot. And a broken-down old house no good for anything but chasing kids has to trip over us. Blind accidents. What can you do against blind accidents?
-- Ben Maddow

#Kids #Fate #Gun

One way or another we all work for our vice.
-- Ben Maddow

#Weakness #Vices #Way

The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster

Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.

People say that slaves were taken from Africa. This is not true: People were taken from Africa, among them healers and priests, and were made into slaves.

Modern medicine is not scientific, it is full of prejudice, illogic and susceptible to advertising. Doctors are not taught to reason, they are programmed to believe in whatever their medical schools teach them and the leading doctors tell them. Over the past 20 years the drug companies, with their enormous wealth, have taken medicine over and now control its research, what is taught and the information released to the public.

I'm a Pisces but I'd rather be a killa whale.

But I'll never see any of those fish," said Maxie."Or those whales. Or any lions or tigers. I'm never going to set foot in a rain forest now, am I? I won't even be able to watch old DVD's about them without electricity. What does the future hold? It's like going back to the middle ages. Nobody knowing what was going on beyond their front doorstep. All I'll ever know is this. This little bit of London.

Everything in the universe is everything else. A man is a killer is a saint is a monkey is a cockroach is a goldfish is a whale, and the Devil is just the angel who asked for More.

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.

Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget.