Charles Sheeler
[Artist, b. 1883, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1965, Dobbs Ferry, New York.]
Isn’t it amazing how photography has advanced without improving?
When one goes back to our early photography whose mechanics was extremely simple and from our modern point of view often crude, it’s easy to see that the present immense elaboration of means isn’t very important.
(1938)
Photography is only visual, thank God! The lens is an unpsychological piece of glass whether formulated by Zeiss or Bausch and Lomb or whomever.
(1938)
I have come to value photography more and more for those things which it alone can accomplish rather than to discredit it for the things which it alone can accomplish rather than to discredit it for the thing which can only be achieved through another medium.
(1938)
My interest in photography, paralleling that in painting, has been based on admiration for its possibility of accounting for the visual world with an exactitude not equaled by any other medium. The difference in the manner of arrival at their destination—the painting being a result of composite image and the photograph being a result of a single image—prevents these media from being competitive.
(1939)
Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.
