Robert Rauschenberg
[Artist, b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, d. 2008, Captiva Island, Florida.]
I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is.
Whatever is there [in the camera’s eye] is a truth, but a truth you have to believe in. What you see in front of you is a fact. You click when you believe it’s the truth.
I don’t crop. Photography is like diamond cutting. If you miss you miss.
My preoccupation in 1949 with photography was supported by a personal conflict between curiosity and shyness. The camera functioned as a social shield. In 1981 I think of the camera as my permission to walk into every shadow…
(1981)
One gets as much information as a witness of activity from a fleeting glance, like a quick look, sometimes in motion, as one does staring at the subject. Because even if you remain stationary, your mind wanders, and it’s that kind of activity that I would like to get into the photograph.
The reason that I started using found photographs early on was because I couldn’t go everywhere. And now I’ve worked my life in such a way that I’ve already nearly been everywhere, so I don’t have to have a secondhand viewpoint.
[Photography is] an excuse to look deliberately, contemplatively, at every shadow or every crack on the wall, or everything that’s too Baroque and confusing to see at once. I guess the closest I come to anything like notebook sketches, to making studies, is taking photographs.
Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.
