A Quote by Rashid Johnson

The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share. — © Rashid Johnson
The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.
The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.
Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.
[I have a] way of making narrative sculpture, where first you make a text and out of that text you make objects. [...] I start with a story and then I make sculpture from that story, it's just that the stories become more and more elaborate.
We are little animals walking on the ground, we have a certain life time, we are acting and interacting with different people, and we are trying to build things, but we are just some sort of virus compared to the entire sky. You always have to remember that the moon, the earth, the sun, they are like the real universal objects. We are just passing by, and it makes life more beautiful to think that way. More relaxing to think that way, that nothing is really important, because you give yourself much more confidence and you forgive yourself more things when you think about that.
If sculpture can really deal with the body, because we all inhabit ourselves, and if sculpture can really do that, which it is supposed to be able to do, and through it ask questions, philosophical questions, about being, I think these are all things we work on, all of us in our different ways, so perhaps somewhere in there, there are moments where dumb objects can speak.
First of all I think of puppets as sculpture. They are sculpture that moves. You could label it any way you want, but for me it always starts in my mind as a sculpture.
How do you make the timelessness of inert, silent objects count for something? How to use the, in a way, dumbness of sculpture in a way that acts on us as living things?
To speak technically photography is the art of writing with light. But if I want to think about it more philosophically, I can say that photography is the art of writing with time. When you capture an image you capture not only a piece of space, you also capture a piece of time. So you have this piece of specific time in your square or rectangle. In that sense I find that photography has more to do with time than with light.
All photographs are about light. The great majority of photographs record light as a way of describing objects in space. A few photographs are less about objects and more about the space that contains them. Still fewer photographs are about light itself.
"You know you are seeing such a photograph if you say to yourself, "I could have taken that picture. I've seen such a scene before, but never like that." It is the kind of photography that relies for its strengths not on special equipment or effects but on the intensity of the photographer's seeing. It is the kind of photography in which the raw materials-light, space, and shape-are arranged in a meaningful and even universal way that gives grace to ordinary objects."
He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light.
If everyone used the Internet to share the things they created themselves, what would that look like? I think it makes objects special again. I guess I'm not really advocating for no objects in the world, but rather the idea of creating within our present means.
When I'm playing comedy, I never do 'jokes.' Sometimes I'll deliver a line in a way I think is more likely to get a laugh, but all the best comedy is played straight. What's funny is the way it hits the world around it or the way it hits the other characters.
I came to painting through sculpture, to images through objects. I think that images sit in the middle, somewhere between objects and words.
Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.
After painting comes Sculpture, a very noble art, but one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade, for which the painter has to invent a process, sculpture is helped by nature. Moreover, Sculpture does not imitate color which the painter takes pains to attune so that the shadows accompany the lights.
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