A Quote by George Santayana

The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.

George Santayana

Quote Topics

About Art Before Being Concern Love Photograph Reality Sophisticated Spontaneous Thank Things Transparent Vehicle

Quote Author

George Santayana
Spanish - Novelist
December 16, 1863 - September 26, 1952

One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.

Sally Mann

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

Duane Michals

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

Ansel Adams

Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.

Clement Greenberg

To hear an artist be transparent is one of the greatest things they could ever do for their fans. I love that, when I see my fans on the road we have real conversations and it's not even that I do it as some big ploy to have album sales. I do it because it's important for them to understand who I am. So, whatever backlash comes along with me being transparent, there's nothing I can do about it.

Sevyn Streeter

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

Clement Greenberg

Only Art is Eternal Wisdom; what is not Art soon perishes. Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist.

Austin Osman Spare

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Roland Barthes

Conflicts of interest' arise when you're not - when you're sneaky about it, when you're shady about it, when you're not transparent about it. If you tell everyone, 'Here's what's going on. Here's the process; here are the people that are playing a role' - that's being transparent.

Sean Spicer

People for whom art is religion can say, "What I love about art is that it points to a higher reality." Well, fine, but the time comes when the smart thing for such a person to do is to let go of the fun of the art and get into the hard work of attaining and understanding that higher reality, unmixed with worldly games.

Jim Woodring

I'd love to live nonbiologically and move about at the speed of light and be in communication with a million people at once and create works of art that are grand and sophisticated and very human at the same time so all these types of things.

Barry Ptolemy

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings.

John Szarkowski

I'm inspired by the fragrance because it is feminine and elegant but not too sophisticated. There's something very simple at the bottom of it but it remains mysterious, it's got different facets. Just like the roles that I love to play, it conveys differing degrees of intensity, lightness and depth... I like to be spontaneous and this fragrance is very spontaneous too.

Amanda Seyfried

I always think of comedy as being spontaneous, and yet everything about filmmaking is not spontaneous.

Eddie Redmayne

There remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity that can speak, whether it's through beauty, or through ugliness, or whatever quality you put into the work. The work doesn't have to be a transparent vehicle for you to say things about life today.