A Quote by Pieter Hugo

A lot of my inspiration is reactionary to images I see in the media. — © Pieter Hugo
A lot of my inspiration is reactionary to images I see in the media.
Time is of the essence, particularly if we're sending images out on social media. The reality is that the majority of images are only viewed for a few seconds, often on a phone or computer. There are so many images freely available that it takes a lot of will power to concentrate and prolong the gaze on one picture at the expense of the thousands of others waiting to be viewed!
I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
I feel like everyone that is in this profession deals with bullying in social media and it's sad. It's a lot of people thinking we don't see it, because we get a lot of things on social media, but at the end of the day, we see these things.
I think there are so many young girls out there who may be discouraged by the images they see in magazines or on TV, because it's such a media-driven culture. But people will be a lot more accepting of themselves when they feel included. Through my website, I'm in touch with a 13-year-old girl from Brazil; like me, she was born with a piece of her arm missing. She thanked me for the work I'm doing and said I give her strength, inspiration and confidence. Showing a young girl like that how you can be happy and have feelings of confidence is one of my biggest achievements to date.
When I do only images, people don't connect with the images because the images are too weird to understand. But when I explain the weird images with straight words, then all of a sudden there is a tension between the two that the audience wants to see.
Inspired by words you have to create images to tell the story, while it's much more difficult to find your own images with a film for inspiration, because someone has already done it for you.
Dreams are more original than images we see in the media, and are surprisingly unaffected by media. For example, the average person watches several hours of television per day, yet dreams are rarely about shows we have watched or news of the day.
When I left Haiti, I was eight. I went to the Congo where my father was working. The only images that I had were the images of Tarzan. That's what I thought Africa was. Of course, the first day I arrived there, I thought I would see a lot of savages dancing on the tarmac.
The images that people see in the media of black people - whether journalistic or narrative - remain horrible. And those images, combined with the lack of respect among black people in the poorer neighborhoods for themselves, and the part the police and other people coming into those neighborhoods play, it creates no value for life.
The images for my works are somewhat insignificant to me. It became an exercise of variation. I only see the surface images as doodles in a sketchbook, but it's hard to not see an image and bring some kind of personal association, though there's not a prescribed idea of what you're supposed to see.
People learn a lot about what they think they know about other people from what they see in the media. If they see certain types of images reproduced over and over again for other groups that limit them to narrow types of roles and portrayals, they start to take those prejudices into their interactions with those people in real society, and that creates all kinds of discriminatory problems.
Often when people are claiming that they are not creative, they mean that they are not artists, writers, athletes, or any other media types demonstrating creativity. Or they know someone who always seems to have a lot of ideas and know that they can't match that. We all have a tendency to idolize those who create what we see in the media. I think it's better to use these people as models rather than idols, especially when these people have aspects of their lives that are similar to us. Then we can take their inspiration as we go on to be creative in our own way in our own lives.
We do not see the danger clearly enough that we develop images adequate to our state of civilization. When you watch TV, you know instantly that there's something wrong with the images. When you open a magazine and see the ads, you know there's something wrong with the images. And it's unhealthy and not good and outright dangerous, in my opinion.
Everybody knows that Steph Curry changed the game. He's such a great athlete, but that's all we see on the TV, on the highlights on social media. I wish we could see what type of people they are more, because that's the leadership to me, that's the inspiration to me.
I believe women need to hear stories and see images that they can identify with, not media-fabricated ideals that even the 'role models' themselves can't live up to.
Movies always fascinated me. They are an endless source of inspiration. There are countless images by great directors that made a profound impression on me, and I see film as a sublime example of teamwork.
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