Catherine Opie Quotes

#1. When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies ... Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me.

Catherine Opie

#2. Radio had been very good to me as a car dealer. It's flexible, and it's fast - you can get on the air in an hour and change your message - and compared to other types of media, it's very good value.

Jim Pattison

#3. One of the greatest things about being an artist is, as you get older, if you keep working hard in relationship to what you want the world to be and how you want it to become, there is a history of interesting growth that resonates with different moments in your life.

Catherine Opie

#4. I tried to get as far away from home as possible after I graduated from high school because I had a hard time being a kid.

Catherine Opie

#5. I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

Catherine Opie

#6. I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it.

Anna Deavere Smith

#7. I go back and forth, but I never wanted to be the photographer of the gay and lesbian community. I will wave a rainbow flag proudly, but I am not a singular identity. I think a singular identity isn't very interesting, and I'm a little bit more multifaceted as a person than that.

Catherine Opie

#8. My favorite band is probably The Cure. We can throw Talking Heads in there too, I listen to them a lot. But The Cure.

Analeigh Tipton

#9. The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.

Catherine Opie

#10. I want to seduce my viewers and be able to hold them with the work. Much of that is done in terms of formalist ideas that I bring to the work.

Catherine Opie

#11. I'm a complete supporter of Obama and kind of in love with him.

Catherine Opie

#12. People who care for you inevitably become beautiful.

Rita Mae Brown

#13. When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox

H.L. Mencken

#14. I always give a print to everybody I photograph, and some of my subjects have told me they have a hard time hanging them up at home.

Catherine Opie

#15. My dad was a very conservative Republican businessman, so obviously I considered it a problem when I realized I was a lesbian.

Catherine Opie

#16. Language is a very complicated thing, and that's one of the reasons why I like making photographs.

Catherine Opie

#17. I like that time is marked by each sunrise and sunset whether or not you actually see it.

Catherine Opie

#18. I do photograph things for people to look at 100 years from now. But we're such a mediated society that things become historical the next day.

Catherine Opie

#19. I can sympathize with everything except suffering. I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing.

Oscar Wilde

#20. There's a lesbian aesthetic, just as there's gay camp, but I don't know if there's such a thing as 'lesbian art.'

Catherine Opie

#21. To be humble is to be so sure of one's self and one's mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one's self and status.

Cornel West

#22. What they do no' understand, they fear, and they hate what makes them afraid, for they think it is a sign o' weakness.

Kate Forsyth

#23. I'm actually doing what I want with my life. I do sometime think I could just shut up and rest on my laurels and say: you know what guys, I'll operate out of the pocket you put me in ... but no way! No way I'm gonna do that! I'd just get bored stiff the first minute.

Paul McCartney

#24. Nature is a dream state at this point, that we almost don't have a real relationship to it unless it's people living off the land and killing our own food and going for it.

Catherine Opie

#25. Things become mainstream when they become imaged over and over again. Something happens in relationship to ideas of representation that makes it more palatable or digestible.

Catherine Opie

#26. I'm very empathic to the construction of masculinity within our culture and how we build these identities up.

Catherine Opie

#27. Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.

John Steinbeck

#28. heart with greater joy than when my grain and new wine abound! (Ps. 4:7)

Beth Moore

#29. I played classical as a kid.

John Legend

#30. Joy is a spiritual element that gives vicissitudes unity and significance.

Helen Keller

#31. Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.

Ben Affleck

#32. Light is everything in photographs and has to be considered in all situations.

Catherine Opie

#33. Try to be like the turtle - at ease in your own shell.

Bill Copeland

#34. The biggest cliche in photography is sunrise and sunset.

Catherine Opie

#35. I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.

Catherine Opie

#36. I really love to drive. It's really hard for me to be a passenger, even though I get to look around a little bit more, but I've gotten really good at driving and looking.

Catherine Opie