Dissent Decree

Thought is impossible without an image.
Aristotle

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is truth.
Richard Avedon

Still there is a large difference between the activity of a photographer, which is always willed, and the activity of a writer, which may not be. one has the right to, may feel compelled to, give voice to one’s own pain—which is, in any case, one’s own property. One volunteers to seek out the pain of others.
Susan Sontag (referring to the work of Diane Arbus)

Fine photography is literature, and it should be.
Walker Evans

What counts in a photo is its plenitude and its simplicity.
Henri Cartier Bresson

Above all the sitter must be made to forget about the camera and the man who is handling it. Complicated equipment and light reflectors and various other items of hardware are enough, to my mind, to prevent the birdie from coming out.
Henri Cartier Bresson

Isn’t the act of drawing, as well as the drawing itself, about becoming rather than being? Isn’t a drawing the polar opposite of a photo? The latter stops time, arrests it; whereas a drawing flows with it.
John Berger

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard

Self doubt is the artist’s bitterest enemy.
Somerset Maughm

Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind—the awareness of perfection.
Agnes Martin

Creativity is essentially the specific fruit of a person’s decision to matter.
Eric Maisel Ph.D.

Accuracy is not truth.
Henri Matisse

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the halls of power that hold it hostage.
Adrienne Rich

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.
Paul Klee

Art is prayer—not the vulgarized notations handed down to us in scriptures, but, a fresh vital discovery of one’s own special presence in the world. Marc Chagall was once asked if he attended a synagogue; he answered that his work is prayer.
Joseph Zinker

One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words.
Goethe

Religion and Art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Willa Cather

I always painted for myself—every serious artist does.
Fritz Scholder

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde

Art does not make peace. That is not its business. Art is peace.
Robert Lowell

When you boil it all down, that is the social purpose of art: the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning.
Robert Hughs

I never cared anything at all what other people thought. Oh, if I’d followed peoples advice it would have been hopeless.
Georgia O’Keeffe