[Art] is one of those terms that everyone believes he or she understands - until asked to define them. All too readily people assume that “art”, as they understand the term, is a universal phenomenon, and they tend to ascribe not only the word itself but also all its connotations to non-Western contexts. As a result, we have come to think of “the artist” as a special kind of person who, because of some universal, almost mystical, principle of inspiration, is found in all societies. But notions of “art” and “artists” are formulations that are made at specific points in history and in specific cultures. For instance, “art” as we think of it in present-day London, new York or Paris, did not exist in Middle Ages, when people did not distinguish between “artisan” and “artist”. The notion of inspired individuals who, by their almost spiritual status, are set apart from ordinary mortals is a concept that gained acceptance in more recent West during Romantic Movement (c. 1770-1848), a period when writers and philosophers asserted the ascendancy of individual experience and a sense of transcendental.

… the making of art is social, not purely personal, activity. Art serves social purposes, though it is manipulated by individual people in social context to achieve certain ends. Art cannot be understood outside its social context.

David Lewis-Williams
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

I am very certain that many, many people have awakened in the middle of the night with a flash of inspiration about some novel they would like to write, or a play or poem or whatever and that most of these inspirations never come to anything. Inspirations are dime to dozen. The difference between the inspiration and the final product is an awful lot of hard work, an awful lot of discipline, an awful lot of training, an awful lot of finger exercises and practices and rehearsals and throwing away of the first draft and so on.

Abraham H. Maslow

I think the best graphic images are those where the compositions are less obvious and/or include a counterpoint. That can be the beginning of story. I have always felt that my most successful photographs are like short stories; they say the most with the least. The best photographs don’t always have stories with answers; sometimes they’re stories that ask questions. And, sometimes they’re not stories at all; instead they may be visual poems or visual adjectives.

… Ernst (Haas) always felt that everyone had their own color key (how you connect colors together in a photograph) and their own composition key (how you deal with a photograph’s “hidden structures” …it’s geometry). “It’s something you don’t go out and create…it’s already within you.”-E.H.

Arthur Meyerson
An interview with Arthur Meyerson by John Paul Caponigro

…for some reason I feel compelled to share with other people what I see in the world, what I observe in the world, because I guess I operate under the illusion, or possibly delusion, that other people might be interested in seeing through my eyes. It’s rather egotistical point of view, but it is in essence the point of view of a photographer who believes that for some reason they have the ability to see the world in a way that others don’t, in a way that will be valuable to other people who don’t see the world that they do.

Brooks Jensen
LensWork, Commentaries #10

I think Art should touch. I think that it should move on to greater consciousness of what one’s life is all about.

In our culture, there’s no place for a whisper to be heard.

I use Nikons. I’m not an equipment nut. I think that you should know your equipment and forget about it. Can you see Joyce and Steinbeck and Hemingway all sitting around comparing typewriters?

What people tend to photograph is what they have been taught to see.

Everybody has fixed ideas in their minds. We’re not open and this is the problem.

The photograph by itself is one experience, but the photograph with the text is quite another experience.

Duane Michals
The Mind of Duane Michals
LensWork No. 9

Today I posted a few photographs I brought back from my recent trip to Greece. Most of them are photographs of stairs from Santorini. It became a surprise even for me when later I looked at the collection: I’m not sure where the theme of stairs came from. I guess it is the way these little villages in Santorini are built: perched on the high cliff above the sea, paths and stairs, dome shaped structures growing on each other. It feels natural as natural world: Santorini is one few places where you feel not aliened by perfect straight lines and forms of modern architecture.

I immediately turned to my bookshelf and found book of legendary Christopher Alexander “The Luminous Ground: The Nature of Order” and turned to the page which offered me an explanation:

Human beings have, in the past, recognized such places as numinous. They are places which carry the spirit. They are places which carry the soul. This language may or may not useful. But what I want to insist on, is only the one thing: some places, some things, are of such a nature that we feel more intensely related to them, we feel a relationship with them, a direct relationship between our self and that thing, that place. We feel it most strongly, and when we feel it we feel that we are connected with all things, with the universe.

Photography is unlike any other contemporary art form. Everyone in the 21st century, at least in the Western world, has experience of having looked at millions of photographs. We see them all the time, and we know what a good photograph is. We are all experts.

The way to collect is to buy a photograph and take it home. Look, react, and commit.

If you’re burdened with worries about photograph’s provenance, the photograph’s “greatness”, the photograph’s price, etc., you may be missing the point. Pursue the experience that’s pleasurable. When you see an image that thrills you, you must have that piece in your life. Buy it, take it home, hang it on the wall, and live with it.

I’ve come to understand my collection as a manifestation of my unconscious. Buying photographs has led me to on an amazingly personal journey and, curiously enough, it has been a tool for gaining an even stronger sense of myself. It is a completely symbiotic relationship: as I have grown, so has the collection, and vice versa.

W.M. Hunt
Collector and Gallerist
Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York

Creativity is simply thinking more clearly and communicating more effectively than has been done previously. CREATE from the Latin create, “to bring into existence.” The “bringing into existence” I speak of here is shared vision, understating, or experience between the artist and the audience through the medium of the “art-ifact”.

Brooks Jensen
Image and Text
LensWork, No. 15

I think when you are making photographs, you work on an intuitive level that is different than your normal level. You reach beyond your intellectual capacity and are in another world, basically. That’s why artists do what they do. It frees them and lets them be something else. As a photographer, you go past yourself and are receptive to that layering, knowing that it might take time.

Jack Stuler
An interview of Jack Stuler by Marilyn Hayers
LensWork No. 19

I feel reasonable sure, having been on several sides of photography for 55 years now, that any photograph that you make for somebody else may pay a substantial fee towards your survival. Anything you do for yourself nobody wants.

Todd Walker
LensWork No. 6