A Quote by Josef Koudelka

I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories. — © Josef Koudelka
I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.
I've said this before, but I don't like putting captions in my comic books. I feel, for me, they become a crutch, a way to ignore the essential fact that our medium is a visual medium, and the greatest pleasures to be derived from comics are how stories can be told with pictures.
I know I play into that image out there, but I try to say it is a fantasy. I look at my own pictures and wish I could look like that. There are probably five people in this whole entire world who actually look like that.
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
. . . the fools of this world prefer to look for sages far away. They don't believe that the wisdom of their own mind is the sage . . . the sutras say, "Mind is the teaching." But people of no understanding don't believe in their own mind or that by understanding this teaching they can become a sage. They prefer to look for distant knowledge and long for things in space, buddha-images, light, incense, and colors. They fall prey to falsehood and lose their minds to insanity.
Successful publication is all about the mix. What Buzzfeed discovered was that people like cat pictures. We can pretend to be embarrassed about that as a species, but it is actually a truth. So Buzzfeed publishes a lot of cat pictures. But they use the money from cat pictures to build an exceptional newsroom that publishes stories that far fewer people want to read, but it is very important journalism.
Stories have inspired me all my life. I like reading about what other people have done and it inspires me to share my own stories, and encourage people to make their own life stories.
I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist.
Even in pictures, people think that I'm over five feet, and when they meet me in person, they're like, 'Oh, you're so short. I didn't expect that because you look so tall in pictures!'
I was an executive at Columbia Pictures for ten years. I was doing great. My career was on the upswing. But, right then, was when I said I gotta quit. I gotta start my own company. I gotta be on the other side of it because I felt the strong call on my life - to tell stories that, on the face of it, might not look like a commercial movie.
I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.
We like to invent new disciplines or look at new problems, and invent bandwagons rather than jump on them.
When I went to Jamia, I thought I wanted to be a cinematographer or photographer because I liked telling stories in pictures, but my teachers explained that if you want to tell your own stories then that is what a director does.
So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.
In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.
My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.
You search for images and stories and movies and music from people that look like you and sound like you and speak like you because you want to feel like, 'Oh, if they can do it, so can I.' There's a little bit of that need for validation, especially when you're younger and trying to look to someone to look up to.
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