Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
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.
Michael Heizer
[Artist, b. 1944, Berkeley, California, lives in Hiko, Nevada.]
I have looked at so many photographs, I can not see them anymore.
Paul Virilio
[Writer and theorist, b. 1932, Paris, lives in La Rochelle, France.]
[When everything becomes visible,] we’ll dream of being blind. This is the engine of art.
Frederick Wiseman
[Filmmaker and Documentarian, b. 1930, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Boston.]
The effort to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
Paul Valéry
[Writer and poet, b. 1871, Sète, France, d. 1945, Paris.]
Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Your sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures that master your sight.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
We live within an ever-deepening strata of visual iconography, sharing shifting signifiers up and down the layers of our lives. Eventually, we mistake abundance for vision. We become blind to our own blindness.
Sophie Ristelhueber
[Photographer, b. 1949, Paris, lives in Paris.]
We have at our disposal modern techniques for seeing everything, apprehending everything,
yet we see nothing.
