The advice I would give to any photographer - young, old or in-between - is to explore anything visual because this is, after all, how you express your artistry. Look at paintings, movies, drawings, sculptures - look at anything visual and try to integrate that into your visual sense. After that, go out and take pictures and keep on taking pictures!
Interpretation
Explore various forms of visual art to enhance your photography skills.
Elliott Erwitt emphasizes the importance of broadening one's artistic perspective by engaging with various visual mediums. He suggests that by studying and integrating the richness of different artistic expressions, photographers can deepen their understanding and mastery of their own art form, ultimately leading to more impactful photographic work.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a photography workshop to inspire participants to explore art.
Making pictures is a very simple act. There is no great secret in photography...schools are a bunch of crap. You just need practice and application of what you've learned. My absolute conviction is that if you are working reasonably well the only important thing is to keep shooting...it doesn't matter whether you are making money or not. Keep working, because as you go through the process of working things begin to happen.
Photography is an art of observation - it's about creating something extraordinary out of the ordinary. You choose a frame and then wait until the right time for something magical to come along and fill it.
I'm almost violent about that stuff - electronic manipulation of pictures. I think it's an abomination. I reject it all. I mean, it's OK for selling corn flakes or automobiles or for taking pimples out of Elizabeth Taylor's face, but it undermines the thing that photography is about, which is about observation and not about manipulation of images.
Now very often events are set up for photographers... The weddings are orchestrated about the photographers taking the picture, because if it hasn't been photographed it doesn't really exist.
There's no great mystique to photography. A lot of photographers like to put their hands up to their forehead and tell you how they've suffered and so forth. Well, I just rent a car and drive to the place and take the pictures.
The main thing is to study pictures and stop listening to the pontifictaions of photographers. Photographers aren't oracles of wisdom. If they're good photographers, then take a good look at their pictures - what else do you need?
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.
Art would be useless if the world were perfect.
I fell in love with skateboarding because it was individual; there were no teams, there were no captains, there was nothing to perfect. No style that had to be measured. It was completely opposite of what I saw in so many sports. It was creative. And to this day, that's what I love, that's always kept me back to it because it's endless creation.
I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.
There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
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