A Quote by Edward Ruscha
Yes, there's a certain power to a photograph. The camera has a way of disorienting a person, if it wants to and, for me, when it disorients, it's got real value.
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A photograph to me is always a reminder of how the person was on a certain day in that certain light fixed. When I look at a watercolor of that same person, it seems to me alive, more open than a photograph.
This is how you can tell a real photographer: mostly, a real photographer does not say 'I wish I had my camera on me right now'. Instead a real photographer pulls out her camera and takes the photograph.
I bought my first camera to photograph my brother's children. I learned a lot from that experience. The value of innocence and of not being focused on yourself, and I have to say that these things have remained with me to this day. I can immediately feel when someone is putting on a camera face.
I think, for me, the only real value to fame, stuff like that, is that you can then have a lot more creative power to get certain movies made and to do certain things.
Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday)
If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by.
... I'm sort of a nervous person with the camera, so I will just shoot arbitrarily until I can focus and compose something, and then I make a shot. So generally, in [the] proof sheets, there are only three or four really concentrated efforts to take a photograph. It's not like a professional kind of person who sets it up so every photograph looks really cool.
I think that the exactitude of the photograph has a sort of compelling nature based in its power to duplicate life. But to me the real power of photography is based in death: the fact that somehow it can enliven that which is not there in a kind of stultifying frightened way, because it seems to me that part of one's life is made up of a constant confrontation with one's own death.
The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.
I never look for a photograph. The photograph finds me and says, I'm here! and I say, Yes, I see you. I hear you.
A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it-even if the person himself wants to stop it.
Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.
Of course, the camera is a far more objective and trustworthy witness than a human being. We know that a Brueghel or Goya or James Ensor can have visions or hallucinations, but it is generally admitted that a camera can photograph only what is actually there, standing in the real world before its lens.
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