It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.
Walker EvansRead
The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
Interpretation
Quality in photography comes from an innate understanding of visual language, developed through experience rather than structured learning.
Walker Evans emphasizes that the essence of quality in great photographs is captured in a visual language that transcends formal education. This language is acquired through serendipity and personal experiences rather than through systematic study, suggesting that true artistic vision is often instinctual and unique to each individual photographer.
In practice
During a photography workshop, one could share this quote to inspire participants to trust their instincts.
It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.
Thatβs my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.
Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
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.
It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.
Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.
Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.
Colours shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only.
There is no separate art of life. If you know how to allow poetry, if you know how to allow dance, if you know how to allow love - if you know how to ALLOW, then you know the art of life. In the allowing, in the let-go, in the surrender, is the art of life. How not to be and to let God be - that is the only art of life.
I'm nothing else but an artist, I'm sure, and delighted to be.
Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.