Walker Evans Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

I'm often asked by students how a photographer gets over the fear and uneasiness in many people about facing a camera, and I just say that any sensitive man is bothered by a thing like that unless the motive is so strong and the belief in what he's doing is so strong that it doesn't matter. The important thing is to do the picture. And I advise people who are bothered by this to cure it by saying to themselves, what I'm doing is harmless to these people really, and there's no malevolence in it and there's no deception in it, and it is done in a great tradition, examples of which are Daumier and Goya. Daumier's Third Class Carriage is a kind of snapshot of some actual people sitting in a railway carriage in France in eighteen-something.

Walker Evans
The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

Walker Evans
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
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
It is the way to educate your eyes, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.

Walker Evans
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
The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader's eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

Walker Evans