Chuck Close Quotes

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

All through my comics career, I was always trying to reinvent the form.

I still take photographs for my own use, personal studies. I do not feel that I can fully express my views through the medium and this is why I have moved towards painting.

Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't.

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean?

I don't think I treat my film work as an extension of my photography. There are two different sets of rules there.

Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.

I think about sculpture all the time. I work at it for ten to twelve hours a day. I even dream about it. If as a result I was only to produce something that everyone immediately understood I would't have been thinking very profoundly.

I think the fact that you have long - term relationships, this is a very unusual thing in the world, and I thought it was fantastic because you build up a trust. Each time you photograph the person, you try to do something else.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of picture - by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don't even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that.

You have to be at the forefront of culture to create art, which they call "product," and Hollywood is not. It's this very old business model, which I think is dying in a lot of ways.

If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel.

I do not think there is any question of photography being an art form!

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.

He's [Constable] a great painter as far as it goes, but I don't think he's remotely interesting. Not really. It's very pretty and it's very thorough, but it's not evocative, it's not dramatic, it doesn't do what Beethoven does - it doesn't shake you down to the roots of your soul, which Turner does. Constable is just very nice, basically. And moving on to personality, Constable was a very dull character.

If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must...intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.