Misrach Richard Quotes & Sayings

Despite the limitations and problems inherent to photographic representation (and especially the representation of politics), it remains for me the most powerful and engaging medium today - one central to the development of cultural dialogue. — Richard Misrach

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing. — Ann Brashares

Every time you think of your dad, you're
resurrecting him. Why shouldn't he continue to live
in this world while resting in the other? — Clyde DeSouza

Lots of ways to have your steak "Well done, medium rare, rare, bloody or fetch me a club". — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Maybe I fear things going wrong so much that I pre-empt them by not getting excited about them when they appear to be. going well. — Jack Dee

I am not unaware that I have the mindset, as contradictory as it may sound, to discover in the world what I am in fact looking for. Perhaps the best pictures are a seamless hybrid of discovery and construction. — Richard Misrach

Now, as I look around at a room filled not only with boxes but plenty of its own marks, I want to know the stories behind them. Or rather, a part of me wants to know those stories. The other part of me thinks that's the worst idea in the world, but I don't listen to that part. Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy, Da's warning echoes in my head, and I know; but there are no Histories here to feel sympathy for. Which is exactly why the Archive wouldn't approve. They don't approve of any form of recreational reading. — Victoria Schwab

I have no doubt that in the future, the laws that criminalize human love and commitment will look the way the apartheid laws do to us now, so obviously wrong — Desmond Tutu

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time. — Richard Misrach

In spite of recent trends towards fabricating photographic narratives, I find, more than ever, traditional photographic capture, the 'discovery' of found narratives, deeply compelling. — Richard Misrach

The best American is one who considers themselves as a citizen of the world. — Chuck D

The desert ... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes ... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself. — Richard Misrach

The very act of representation has been so thoroughly challenged in recent years by postmodern theories that it is impossible not to see the flaws everywhere, in any practice of photography. Traditional genres in particular-journalism, documentary studies, and fine-art photography-have become shells, or forms emptied of meaning. — Richard Misrach

Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites. — John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

I'm not interested into victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird. — Richard Misrach

The one thing that seems to be consistent through all my work that I like, and I experimented a lot, is the viewer is allowed to meditate on something that normally we don't stop and stare at, whether it's people or a cactus. — Richard Misrach

People have responded to the pictures I make as mystical things, and they somehow carry the illusion further thinking that the place is this mystical, magical place. The desert is also a very barren place, a very lonely place, a very boring, uneventful place. — Richard Misrach

Forgiving is an inward act that establishes outer boundaries; it is an undefeatable triumph of self-compassion that proclaims you are no longer a victim. — Bryant McGill

Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn't fit into a grand narrative, the way we've been taught to read. — Richard Misrach

I've come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas. — Richard Misrach

They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance — Oscar Wilde

We practice so that each moment of our life becomes real life. And, therefore, when we meditate, we sit for sitting; we don't sit for something else. — Thich Nhat Hanh

One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound's Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It's epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you'd be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French-he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who's not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something. — Richard Misrach

He'd stood amidst the ranks more than once, sensing the soldiers alongside him seeking and finding that place in the mind, cold and silent, the place where husbands, fathers, wives and mothers became killers. And practice made it easier, each time. Until it becomes a place you never leave. — Steven Erikson

I hate to repeat lines, to say the same damned thing. I try to rewrite cliches and make what I say sound fresh. — Gary McCord

The virtual choir would never replace live music or a real choir, but the same sort of focus and intent and esprit de corps is evident in both, and at the end of the day it seems to me a genuine artistic expression. — Eric Whitacre

I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do. — Richard Misrach

If it were easy it would not be any fun. — T Jay Taylor

To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world. — Richard Misrach