Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
Scott Adams (1957-) is an American author and cartoonist.
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Creativity vs. Art
Photography Takes an Instant Out of Time
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist. She is best known for her work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression.
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Creative Work Needs Solitude
Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart – to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet popular for her brief and poignant poems exploring the links between nature and the spiritual world.
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A Great Photograph
A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams (1902-1984), American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West.
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The Earth Is Art
“The earth is art, the photographer is only a witness.”
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Yann Arthus-Bertrand (b. 1946) is a French environmentalist, activist, journalist and photographer.
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A Reality So Subtle
In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz (1864 – 1946) was an American photographer and founder of the controversial movement Photo-Secession that promoted photography as a fine art.
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The Man of Faith Steps In and Does Something
“I tell you, if one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they’ll achieve it by doing no harm — and that’s a lie, and you said yourself in the past that it was a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity…
You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter, “You can’t do anything.” The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of “You can’t.”
Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas. But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something...”
The Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890) on taking action, from Ever Yours: The Essential Letters
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Having an Enviable Career Is One Thing. Being a Happy Person Is Another.
(…) having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another. Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
Bill Watterson (b. 1959 -) is an American cartoonist and the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson talked about the difference between ambition and happiness in his speech ‘Some thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled’, Kenyon College – 1990
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It Is an Illusion That Photos Are Made With the Camera
It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) was a French photographer considered a master of candid street photography.
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We Must Not Be Defeated
There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats—maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats—but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be.
Maya Angelou (1928–2014), was an American poet, storyteller, and autobiographer.
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