Keith Carter Quotes

The full weight and mystery of your art rests upon your relationship to your subject matter.

How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.

I'm fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture.

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.

The raw materials of photography are light and time and memory.

Sharpness is overrated.

I want to be made better personally. That is the gig.

Your ideas come out of the way you conduct your life.

I don't think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

I don't know if I can articulate how I feel. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would make it here.

At a fundamental level photography is much like pointing, and all of us occasionally point at things: look at that, look at that sailboat, look at that tree, etc. etc.

I love the history of photography and one process has always replaced another. However, very, very few have disappeared.