What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the desire to create art that captures the complexity and mystery of life.
In this quote, William Klein expresses his aspiration to make photographs that embody the same level of uncertainty and ambiguity that exists in real life. He suggests that art, particularly photography, should not simply present reality in a straightforward manner but instead invite viewers to explore its deeper meanings and complexities, mirroring the often incomprehensible nature of life itself.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about the role of ambiguity in modern art.
When you use film, you use accidents, but there aren't any accidents with digital photography. I don't mind that it's easy. But I do mind that there is a sort of consensus with the camera and the subject and the light, and you look at something, and you photograph it, and you get what you see.
Memories. That's the thing about photography. I look at the contact sheet, and it brings back everything: whether I was tired, whether I was full of beans.
Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.
I don't care about being a pioneer. People act like it would be cool to be a pioneer. I'm okay to be looked at as that, but it's just that we don't get transmitted our cultural heritage as women artists.
Because if we the storytellers don't do this, then the bad people will win.
Theatre is liberating because it only works if it's truthful, That's what it requires. That's not true of film: the camera does lie.
Thereβs a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy. If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.
All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.
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