Cultural Documentation Quotes

An artist is made to entertain. That's their primary goal, to entertain you. But some artists record the moments of time. You wouldn't know what was happening in the '20s and '30s; you got to check the song or art.

Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

I do a lot of cultural material that's based on my traveling around the world. I basically just report what I've seen and where I've been.

In fact, Guerra based his story on the diaries of two explorers, German Theodor Koch-Grunberg and American Richard Evans Schultes. There work is some of the only documentation of cultures that have since vanished. But Guerra did not want white men to be his protagonists.

Stick a camera up in an Indian village, and thousands of people come to watch.

I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.

[ My time and our common culture] it's what I'm photographing, and I'm very involved with that.

That is what [Andy] Warhol portraits do: They elevate the subject into an icon of the pop culture he was documenting.

At the close of my visit, my Hawaiian friends urged me strongly to publish my impressions and experiences, on the ground that the best books already existing, besides being old, treat chiefly of aboriginal customs and habits now extinct, and of the introduction of Christianity and subsequent historical events.

And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew, give them a first real run-through of their art.

I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.

There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes.

The Documents Project has actively collected documentation on both island-based Puerto Rican art as well as Nuyorican art in the United States through partnerships and researchers ceded at the University of Puerto Rico's museum in San Juan and Hunter College's Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York City, respectively.

When you meet the man [Brassai] you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes. And the sharpness of vision and depth of insight are revealed in Brassai's lifelong photographic exploration of Paris - its people, places, and things.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

Like, music and songs, what we do, we can capture history as artists, so that's what I really try to do.

One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.

I believe the man who will go down in posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him.

Haiti itself was also photographed, some of the streets, some of the mountains, rivers, streams, etc. were photographed before talking with me about how I felt about Haiti. Then the camera went to our voodoo temple and saw a serious ceremony, a real ceremony.

Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'

I now want to be a photographer of my time, and our common culture.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

Every play is so important. It's a record of what life was like at the time you wrote that play or that book.