A Quote by David Doubilet

What I like best about underwater photography is giving a visual voice to the invisible. What I like least is the prospect of drowning. — © David Doubilet
What I like best about underwater photography is giving a visual voice to the invisible. What I like least is the prospect of drowning.
They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241)
Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.
My paintings have an ongoing dialogue with photography. There are many painters who would say the same, I'm sure. The difference is that I'm thinking more about the temporal aspect of photography, rather than the visual.
Spring and fall in New York are the best seasons here to get out and about. I like the little park in Dumbo between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridge. I like Prospect Park.
I rehearsed it a lot underwater with a mouthpiece for Casino Royale and not freaking out, because you can't see a thing. It's like being in a really bad nightmare. I've never seen somebody drown, but I really swallowed water. It was like choreography. It was very emotional. I was crying underwater at one point.
For me photography is not an intellectual process. It is a visual one.... Whether we like it or not, we are involved in a sensual business.
If you're going to be a visual artist, then there has to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility of the invisible, the opposite of the visual experience. That's why it's not like a table or a car or something. I think that that might even be hard for people because most of our visual experiences are of tables. It has no business being anything else but a table. But a painting or a sculpture really exists somewhere between itself, what it is, and what it is not-you know, the very thing. And how the artist engineers or manages that is the question.
Sea Hunt was the first time anyone tackled a show that took place underwater. The stories were sort of exciting for kids, like cops and robbers underwater.
I guess the best thing about having a successful record like this is, like, I know I'm at least good for another five years, like, before everyone starts to like - all the haters start to come out again. And that's really what it is.
It's like, the more you zoom in and focus on the details, the closer to the invisible and immeasurable qualities - like consciousness and energies - you get. And expanding outwards, into the cosmos, you learn more about the invisible or perceptible things.
I really don't want to produce artwork that does not have meaning beyond simple decorative values. I want to use public space to create a public voice, and a public consciousness about the presence of people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way. By telling their stories we are giving voice to the voiceless and visualizing the whole of the American story.
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.
To me, photography is not just a visual art, but something closer to poetry - or at least to some poetry, such as the haiku.
I got good at trying to throw a voice on a character from the very beginning as opposed to like reading it and sitting with it and mulling over it and stuff like that just try to read what it is and then try to put a funny voice to it like as soon as possible and stuff like that. Once you get laughs with your voice then you can start thinking about, you know the physical characteristics and how they might walk or if they stick out their buck teeth or if they wear an afro and stuff like that. I think like finding the voice of the character helps to like build the wardrobe and everything else.
There are no words and there is no singing, but the music has a voice. It is an old voice and a deep voice, like the stump of a sweet cigar or a shoe with a hole. It is a voice that has lived and lives, with sorrow and shame, ecstasy and bliss, joy and pain, redemption and damnation. It is a voice with love and without love. I like the voice, and though I can't talk to it, I like the way it talks to me. It says it is all the same, Young Man. Take it and let it be.
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