A Quote by Roy DeCarava
For me, photography must be visual, rather than intellectual and ideological.
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My paintings have an ongoing dialogue with photography. There are many painters who would say the same, I'm sure. The difference is that I'm thinking more about the temporal aspect of photography, rather than the visual.
For me photography is not an intellectual process. It is a visual one.... Whether we like it or not, we are involved in a sensual business.
Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.
Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated.
Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.
The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).
[Photography] is always like a state of grace, like the appearance of something that I hadn't foreseen, that surprises me and stops me. If I only did what I had in mind, there would be no emotion. It would be like keeping one's eyes shut rather than open, like theorizing rather than seeing.
The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.
As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
The classic rule of thumb is that if you are an intellectual ideological magazine, you do better in opposition than you do if your views are reflected by people in power.
[My photography teacher] gave me the Mexican Day Books of Edward Weston and just blew me away with this work. The fact that you could be this fabulous visual artist, with all this milieu of people like Diego Rivera and you could sleep with these gorgeous, amazing women, that you could live that life - that photography could deliver you that life.
The English mind is intelligent rather than intellectual. The French are intellectual in the sense that the intellect is emancipated and left free to run its own course.
Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.
Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.
The concrete is better than the abstract. The detail is better than the commonplace. The sensual [through the senses] is better than the intellectual. The visual is better than the mental.
One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.
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