Dawoud Bey Quotes

#1. Average people look for ways of getting away with it; successful people look for ways of getting on with it.

Jim Rohn

#2. Improvisational things about picture-making ... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits].

Dawoud Bey

#3. Black people have been killed for directing their gaze at the wrong person. I want my subjects to reclaim their right to look, to see, to be seen.

Dawoud Bey

#4. If done well, I believe the photographic representation of the human subject has the potential to be more revealing than what is revealed by the eye alone, since the human glance is usually a momentary one.

Dawoud Bey

#5. While I have devised various formal strategies for articulating [my] concerns, I think fundamentally the work is driven by a basic curiosity. I seek to find out things about people by making photographs of them.

Dawoud Bey

#6. People say don't stare. Through the photos, not only do I stare, but I allow viewers to stare at the subject, to see things that they cannot see with a casual glance.

Dawoud Bey

#7. When you have succeeded in letting go of a trivial preoccupation or two, your awareness will begin to expand into the deeper sources of stress in your life, the bigger uncontrollable things that you have been at pains to control.

Linda Bender

#8. It doesn't matter how precisely the onion is cut as long as the person chewing it is happy.

Padma Lakshmi

#9. Life is a one-way journey toward the unknown. So make it an exciting awesome adventure.

Debasish Mridha

#10. I always wanted my photographs to challenge the status quo, to contest the kinds of images that existed in popular culture ...

Dawoud Bey

#11. I like to use the hard times in the past to motivate me today.

Dwayne Johnson