Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view.
Ernst HaasRead
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
Interpretation
The quality of your photography reflects your inner self and vision.
In this quote, Ernst Haas suggests that the limitations of one's photography are not due to external factors or the camera itself, but rather stem from the photographer's own perspective and understanding. This implies that personal growth and self-awareness directly influence the quality of artistic expression.
In practice
Using this quote to inspire aspiring photographers at a workshop.
Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view.
Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.
There was something in her movements that made you think she never walked but always danced.
The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.
As a child, I was taught that it was bad manners to bring attention to yourself, and to never, ever make a spectacle of yourself ... All of which I've earned a living doing.
When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.
We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.
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