Beat Streuli quotes

“My work doesn't speak about individuals (it's not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in cities of the West - which is where I live and what I understand.”
-- Beat Streuli

#Cities Quotes #Trying Quotes #Portraiture Quotes

“At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one's own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person's skin.”
-- Beat Streuli

#Individuality Quotes #Skins Quotes #World Quotes

“...I don't see myself as a documentary photographer. I am more drawn to the image itself, rather than to the description of a scene. And, anyway, every image only halfway represents reality, whereas the other half is rather, more or less, fulfilling our imagination.”
-- Beat Streuli

#Reality Quotes #Imagination Quotes #Half Quotes

“I like to be flexible in the way I take pictures. I do not use a tripod, and I move around in the crowd, of which I am myself part.... I try to preserve the dynamics of the street, and my way of using the camera tries to approximate as much as possible the way we see: focusing on details, opening up to wider angles, and composing all these very short, fragmented impressions into a larger mental picture.”
-- Beat Streuli

#Moving Quotes #Opening Up Quotes #Trying Quotes

“I prefer the countryside to cities. This is also true of my films: I have made more films in rural societies, and villages, than in towns.”

“Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed”

“It is my plan to create a city that is direct and simple... To leave out all that is ugly, to eliminate the unnecessary, and to give Florida and the nation a resort city as perfect as study and ideals can make it.”

“A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.”

“I, personally, am trying to get more and more involved with the gay and lesbian movement, very much so.”

“It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.”

Source : In Observer 17 Aug. 1986

“A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.”

“With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.”

“I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.”

“If a figure doesn't look back at you, you forget it.”

Source : Nathan Oliveira, Eugenia Parry, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries (1991). “Nathan Oliveira: paintings and works on paper, 1959-1991”