I am a sucker for pithy sayings, these are some of my favourites and tend to fit in with my artistic philosophy. It appears I have quoted myself quite a lot too.
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. Confucius
'We hate it when our friends become successful and if they're northern?...well' Morrissey.
'I indulge before joy evaporates and time renders me invisible' JT
'I have no problem with commercial photography or commercial art, in fact I am amazed and entertained by a lot of it. My problem comes when the practitioners in these fields call their work Art with the capital A.' JT
''The notion of a style-less, transparent art is one of the most tenacious fantasies of modern culture'. Susan Sontag.
'To attempt to avoid style in pursuit of objectivity is hopeless, the very adoption of a style-less approach becomes stylistic immediately' JT.
'Never a borrower or a lender be' My mother
'If you are going to buy a hoover buy a hoover hoover' My mother
'You see that mountain and river, an artist would see that differently from us' My father.
'I've risen from the depths of anonymity to the heights of obscurity' JT 1977
'If I say its art then its art, if I say its shit then its shit!' Howard Canatella, RCA.
'I used to think everyone in the world was nice like me' JT
'Don't mistake my kindness for kindness' JT
'In regard to tone or inflection, or the apparent depersonalization of style...Walker Evans is most important. The attempt to make a photgraph from which the photographer seems to be absent is a strategy whose value and power all of us I think primarily have learnt from him.' Frank Gohlke (New Topographics)
'I used to think everyone around me were arseholes, then one day I woke up and realised I was one too ' John Lennon
'Light and form pretty much do it for me, I can't get past the way things look. The world is a fantastic thing to observe and I'm constantly hooked by it. Thankfully this helps keep my art simple, and the older I get the more simple my approach seems to be.' JT
'Zero tolerance for intolerants!!' JT
'Ah youth, it left me quickly but not the remorse' JT
'Never assume everybody likes mustard in their ham sandwiches' My mother
'An artist consumes the world and regurgitates it in a variety of ways. Sometimes these regurgitations are inscrutable, sometimes decipherable. Sometimes they can touch your soul and take on longevity because of their specialness, mostly they are uninspirational and wither away. Artists who do not take risks are not really artists, a true artist is prepared to risk failure and opprobrium' JT.
'Your fathers mad and he'll be dead by christmas' My mother
'If somethings worth doing its worth doing to excess' Oscar Wilde
'I can resist anything except temptation' Oscar Wilde
'You should always leave the table feeling you could eat more' My mother
'I love the way things look in photographs' Gary Winogrand
'Anyone can be a photographer, some put themselves up as artists but confuse arse with art' JT
'Documentary photography increasingly leaves me cold. So much of it does not document anything as well as it could. Mostly its about indulgent photographic careerism. The subject (usually carefully chosen for its degree of sexiness ) increasingly comes a poor second to the photographer and his ego.' JT
'You can analyse a glass of water and you're left with a lot of chemical components but nothing you can drink ' (Haldane). (I use this in relation to people who are so confused about analysing their artistic reasons and what their art is about that they are rendered creatively constipated.) see below.
Over theorisation can prevent many people from making images as they get confused and creatively constipated, especially those who have undertaken formal art education. I used to have that problem but eventually recovered from my educational experience and realised that aesthetic theoretical over-analysis was crippling my ability to produce images. Now I am liberated and simply follow my creative instincts leaving analytic posturing for others.' JT
'So much of current photography is about capturing 'the big shot', 'the knockout', 'the epic'. Overworked in digital editing skies becomes over dramatic, colour saturation over applied, shadows impossibly open, aerial perspective flattened. I want to see the quiet corners of housing estates, the inside of a dusty cupboard, the quiet moments photographers ignore, the minutae, the ordinary, the flat, the grey. What one is gets today is an airbrushed lush hyper-real sterile souless concoction. This is the photograph in the digital age.' JT