David Hockney Quotes

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Draw what you see.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.

The matter does not appear to me now as it has appears to have appeared to me then.

What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

In a way, it's like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I'm known for are not really my image, they're always the photographer's vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image.

If a man cannot see a church, it is preposterous to take his opinion about its altar-piece or painted window.

New ways of seeing can disclose new things… But turn the question around. Do new things make for new ways of seeing?

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was.

I can only draw what I see.

A flower is relatively small... Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?

How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don't.

Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see...And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are...that's the world, isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth.

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.