Bill Jay Quotes
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Be gentle and tolerant. Intimacy will grow, but will take time and cannot be rushed. If all goes well, soon you will become more familiar with each other, and handling will forge awkward fumbling and fondling into more satisfying and productive caresses and eventually into a comfortable working partnership. At this stage you will be ready to accompany your new camera into the world.
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'Ornithologists concluded that migratory birds take hundreds of naps as they fly; they also practice unilateral eye closure, in which one eye closes, thereby permitting half the brain to sleep.' Is this what happens when photographers close one eye to look through a viewfinder? If so, they might be operating with only half a brain. Perhaps that explains.
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Predators and prey always coexist. That's why we have galleries as well as photographers.
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If you are intent on drawing or painting on your prints, you must first learn to draw and paint at least as well as you photograph.
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I talk a lot about photography. It's cheap becuase my supply always exceeds demand.
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I'd like my coffin to be a camera obscura so I can see what's going on outside.
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I was offered $100,000 for a print. Then I woke up.
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Asked for your opinion on the prints, you have two choices: truth or tact. I ask for the bathroom.
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Advice to artists: always take the opportunity to shut up.
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If you are bored with your own photography you are really bored with what you are photographing, so pick a new subject about which you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic.
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...photographers who carry 60 pounds of equipment up a hill to photograph a view are not suffering enough, although their whining causes enough suffering among their listeners. No, if they really expect us to respect their search for enlightenment and artistic expression, in the future they will drag the equipment up the hill by their genitals and take the view with a tripod leg stuck through their foot.
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...the subject, the thing itself, is the genesis of all types of photography.
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This is life. It is everywhere, and it is here for the taking. I am alive and I know this, now, in a more profound way than when I am doing anything else. These sights are ephemeral, fleeting treasures that have been offered to me and to me alone. No other person in the history of the world, anywhere in all of time and space, has been granted this gift to be here in my place. And I am privileged, through the camera, to take this moment away with me. That is why I photograph.
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I agree, intellectualism in photography is overrated. I just wish it could be replaced by common sense.
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Photography opens your eyes a little wider to the world around you.
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Photographers have already photographed everything too many times, except cheese.
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Think clearly, act sensibly, commit yourself to caring and work hard in order to discover joy. Then give the images back to the world from which they were taken.
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If you cannot think of anything to say that is useful or enlightening about your images, then don't say anything. There are plenty of other people who would love to put words in your mouth.
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Museum collections have given photography rigor, and mortis.
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I seem to walk in the world as two people. The normal everyday-me is as preoccupied, unobservant and oblivious to visual clues as I ever was. Then there is the photographer-me, the one who has a camera in hand and a specific project in mind, and then the world suddenly jumps to life with potential pictures, as if a switch had been thrown in my brain and a different person is looking out of the same eyes.
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Why do photographers photograph? To make unreality visible.
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A photograph is a picture and no more true or false than any other depiction; why is that so hard to comprehend?
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When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants.
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Words of wisdom for every photographer: 'Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking'. So said Goethe.