Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Color is vulgar, beauty is unimportant, and nature is trivial.
If you photograph what’s before your eyes and you’re in an impoverished environment, you’re not—and shouldn’t be, I think—trying to change the world or commenting on this and saying: “Open up your heart and bleed for these people.” I would never dream of saying anything like that; it’s too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything.
When you are young you are open to influences, and you go to them, you go to museums. Then the street becomes your museum; the museum itself is bad for you. You don’t want your work to spring from art; you want it to commence from life, and that’s in the street now.