A Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like. — © Robert Rauschenberg
Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.
As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.
Anthropology... has always been highly dependent upon photography... As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly essential as a part of anthropological methods, the need for photographers with a disciplined knowledge of anthropology and for anthropologists with training in photography has increased. We expect that in the near future sophisticated training in photography will be a requirement for all anthropologists. (1962)
I always liked photography in film - I studied photography growing up. I like the medium of film; I like physically holding 35-mm film. I like the way it looks, the quality when it's projected. I like the way it frames real life.
[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.
What to me is anathema - a corpse-like, outmoded hangover - is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. ... Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?
This idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. … In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent it’s an idealized order I’m imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like.
Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.
To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There's the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you're always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography.
Photography, as an invention, was both art and science. The view it gave us of the world was in some measure acceptable because it was a product of our vision of the world; and it did so as part of the same process which seemed to impart 'truth': science.
Vision looks inwards and becomes duty. Vision looks outwards and becomes aspiration. Vision looks upwards and becomes faith.
Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.
I want to go to someone's world. I'll buy it if the world is full of zombies - I'll live there if you give me a strong enough vision of what that world looks like.
In the end, photography for me is just an excuse to get to know the world.
If just a few people make decisions about what this world looks like, what this country looks like, then you have people sitting in offices at major media outlets and Hollywood who think they can deal with a small group of people, to get them to jump through the hoops they want you to.
I think of many people and no one as a muse. I love the way Sofia looks always, and I love the way Kim looks always. Fashion may be part of their world, but it's not their whole life. It's not everything.
In my years of photography I have learned that many things can be sensed, seen, shaped, or resolved in a realm of quiet, well in advance of, or between, the actual clicking of shutters and the sloshing of films and papers in chemical solutions. I work to attain a state of heart, a gentle space offering inspirational substance that could purify one's vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of the spirit.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!