A Quote by Alvin Langdon Coburn

Why should not the camera artist break away from the worn out conventions and claim the freedom of expression which any art must have to be alive.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Quote Topics

Alive Any Art Artist Away Break Camera Claim Conventions Expression Freedom Freedom Of Expression Must Out Should Which Why Worn Worn Out

Quote Author

Alvin Langdon Coburn
American - Photographer
June 11, 1882 - November 23, 1966

If some people can imagine that a person they love is alive in another world, why can't I imagine Maurice is alive in this one An artist is a person who uses art to run away from reality. It's not wrong-it's survival. There's nothing wrong with me creating a world in which Maurice is alive.

Robin Gibb

Western countries allow no freedom of expression, which they claim to advocate, with regard to the myth of the massacre of Jews known as the holocaust, and nobody in the West enjoys the freedom of expression to deny it or raise doubts about it.

Ali Khamenei

...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

Andrei Tarkovsky

When I began making art, I just thought I liked it. As a woman who was placed in spaces with various conditions, conventions, and restrictions on self-expression, turning to art - whether visual art, writing novels, or writing articles - was to gain freedom from the space around me.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature - translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.

Hans Hofmann

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.

Joyce Carol Oates

I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of thought - the freedom to explore and move in unexpected ways.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance.

Wayne White

Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?

Vladimir Lenin

Why should I need an artist to explain a work of art to me? Why should it not speak out to me itself?

Mahatma Gandhi

The camera for an artist is just another tool. It is no more mechanical than a violin if you analyze it. Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera.

Brett Weston

There ought to be only one large art warehouse in the world, to which the artist could carry his art-works and from which he could carry away whatever he needed. As it is one must be half a tradesman.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Art is frightening. Art isn't pretty. Art isn't painting. Art isn't something you hang on the wall. Art is what we do when we're truly alive. An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it (all of it, the work, the process, the feedback from those we seek to connect with) personally.

Seth Godin

You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions.

Lev Grossman

Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.