Quotes from Walker Evans

Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Die knowing something. You're not here long.

The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time; and is why in turn I feel such rage at its misuse: which has spread so nearly universal a corruption of sight that I know of less than a dozen alive whose eyes I can trust even so much as my own.'   'If

That impulse took hold of me so powerfully, from my whole body, not by thought, that I caught myself from doing it exactly and as scarcely as you snatch yourself from jumping from a sheer height: here, with the realization that it would have frightened them still worse (to say nothing of me) and would have been still less explicable; so that I stood and looked into their eyes and loved them, and wished to God I was dead.

a new suit of overalls has among its beauties those of a blueprint: and they are a map of a working man.

I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.

... nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'

Good photography is unpretentious.

It's too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else... I equate that with propaganda; I think that's a lower rank of purpose.

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn't need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.

It's the way to educate your eyes. Stare. Pry, listen eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Documentary: That's a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, although it can adopt that style.

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.