Sebastian Smee quotes

“Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision.”
-- Sebastian Smee

#Photography Quotes #Precision Quotes

“Still, there is a basic reticence about his approach that feels refreshing in today's culture of maximum exposure. Brandt did not go to great lengths to turn people into icons, nor did he presume to show their “true nature” in something so transient as a photograph. Instead, he used photography's special qualities to suggest intimate things about his subjects, things that cannot be put into words, and may not even be possible to put into pictures.”
-- Sebastian Smee

#Photography Quotes #Icons Quotes #People Quotes

“Pastoureau combines a charming, conversational tone with a haughtiness I found entirely endearing. A director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne in Paris, he writes from a position of professorial confidence. He has conducted extensive research into the history of colour for a quarter century and his aim is to correct misapprehensions and banish ignorance. His style is not to inquire, explore or interrogate, in the fashion of academic studies today. It is to impart knowledge.”
-- Sebastian Smee

#Fashion Quotes #Writing Quotes #Ignorance Quotes

“Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.”

Source : A. D. Coleman (1995). “Critical Focus: Photography in the International Image Community”, Nazraeli Press

“Photography has the power to undo your assumptions about the world.”

“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.”

“To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.”

“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.”

Source : Aaron Siskind, Maricia Battle, Ann Banks, Federal Writers' Project, National Museum of American Art (U.S.) (1990). “Harlem photographs, 1932-1940”, Smithsonian Inst Pr

“I can not be mistaken - what I say and do is historical.I follow my life with the precision and security of a sleep walker”

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”

“Golf is a game of precision, not strength.”

“The whole experience of doing a sitcom is... Telling jokes with such precision is really exciting, but it's also terrifying.”

Source : Interview with Will Harris, www.avclub.com. February 21, 2012.

“Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others”