Quotes About Walker Evans

#1. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Walker Evans

#2. The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

Walker Evans

#3. Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.

Walker Evans

#4. Good photography is unpretentious.

Walker Evans

#5. When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn't considered an artist. I didn't get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that's just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it ...

Walker Evans

#6. It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.

Walker Evans

#7. I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.

Walker Evans

#8. That's my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.

Walker Evans

#9. Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Walker Evans

#10. I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Walker Evans

#11. Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.

Walker Evans

#12. I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn't need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.

Walker Evans

#13. Science has rolled its war wagons over the crushed myths of so many religious beliefs. It has marshaled its mechanics to explain the motions of the sun, moon, and stars. It has mapped the heavens, leaving no place for gods to live.

Walker Evans

#14. Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.

Walker Evans

#15. I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what's before your eyes.

Walker Evans

#16. In order to put meaning back into our lives, we should recognize illusions for what they are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.

Walker Evans

#17. I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.

Walker Evans

#18. Do we know what we look like? Not really.

Walker Evans

#19. What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman.

Walker Evans

#20. Nobody should touch a Polaroid [camera] until he's over sixty

Walker Evans

#21. Die knowing something. You're not here long.

Walker Evans

#22. I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.

Walker Evans

#23. I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but ... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another.

Walker Evans

#24. The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

Walker Evans

#25. You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, although it can adopt that style.

Walker Evans

#26. It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.

Walker Evans

#27. I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.

Walker Evans

#28. What America needs is a political revolution.

Walker Evans

#29. Nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'

Walker Evans

#30. Documentary: That's a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear ... The term should be documentary style ... You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.

Walker Evans

#31. Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens.

Walker Evans

#32. Privilege, if you're very strict, is an immoral and unjust thing to have, but if you've got it you didn't choose to get it and you might as well use it. You're privileged to be at Yale, but you know you're under an obligation to repay what's been put into you.

Walker Evans