Quotes About Observation

I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don't like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of a greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.

No we should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Queremos que el fotógrafo sea un espía en la casa del amor y de la muerte y que los retratados no sean conscientes de la cámara, se encuentren con la guardia baja.

I like watching people, but I don't like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them.

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.

La cámara transforma a cualquiera en turista de la realidad de otras personas, y a la larga de la propia.

A câmera faz com que todos sejam turistas na realidade alheia e, eventualmente, na sua própria.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

To look at something which is "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something—if only the ghosts of one's own expectations.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.

O fotógrafo é um superturista, um prolongamento do antropólogo, que visita os nativos e regressa com notícias dos seus costumes exóticos e estranhos ornamentos. O fotógrafo procura sempre colonizar novas experiências ou encontrar novos modos de olhar para temas familiares - para lutar contra o tédio.

Hay belleza o cuando menos interés en todo, si se ve con un ojo suficientemente perspicaz.

Yes, eyes are special. But besides the eyes of the flesh, which are mostly water, there are the secret eyes. Don't you know, that you can really see? In a way most people can't. And that most of what people are looking at is just debris.

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.

You're becoming more and more deeply in debt to yourself, and you are already bankrupt. You look at yourself too much. That's the beginning of all absurdity. Look about you. The world is an interesting place.

Fotografiar es esencialmente un acto de no intervención. La persona que interviene no puede registrar; la persona que registra no puede intervenir.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. - Susan Sontag