Katy Grannan quotes

This is the way photography can be cruel... in the sense that it describes everything, even the things we are not necessarily aware we're revealing.
-- Katy Grannan

#Photography #Way #Revealing

I have a terror of things being nice and knowing what to expect. Making a photograph is a license to have experiences that I would not otherwise have.
-- Katy Grannan

#Nice #Knowing #Photograph

I think [indications of vulnerability are] why so many portraits work when they're difficult: we believe we're presenting ourselves one way, but the camera always reveals something more vulnerable, despite our best efforts.
-- Katy Grannan

#Believe #Thinking #Best Effort

There's always been something illicit about the way I work. I'm photographing people I don't know, when nobody else is home - there's a necessary degree of secrecy.
-- Katy Grannan

#Home #People #Degrees

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

In the last stage of the spiritual master's life, the devotees of the spiritual master should take preaching activities into their own hands. In this way the spiritual master can sit down in a solitary place and render nirjana-bhajana.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric.

How can we say nobody's perfect if there is no perfect to compare to? Perfection implies that there really is a right and wrong way to be. And what type of perfection is the best type? Moral perfection? Aesthetic? Physiological? Mental?

Facts can be so misleading, where rumors, true or false, are often revealing.

A true work of art can stand many seeings, revealing anew at each seeing.

When the symbols are 'public' they usually act in an oblique manner, revealing themselves as archetypal symbols, which though familiar, have their central meanings obscured as is usual in esoteric imagery.