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Quote by Larry Sultan

“...when it comes down to making work that really sings, I don't know if I can teach any of it. I don't even know if I can do any of it half the time. It's so much about failure, it's so much about making pictures that are so utterly boring and overstated, you're endlessly disappointed. And in that process you hopefully find something that draws you back and calls to you.”

Quote by Larry Sultan

Author

Larry Sultan was an influential American photographer known for his unique style and profound insights into social reality. His work often focuses on the details of family, community, and everyday life, documenting the changes in American society across different historical periods. more

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“I'm very interested in making the photographs look real, but a lot of them are highly synthetic. They're hybrids, located somewhere between the found and the constructed.”

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“...I think finding that room to make pictures that don't jump off the wall as, or detonate as dramatic, either in lighting or in form or in composition or in subject matter, but more ordinary, that's the challenge.”

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“Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography - to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging.... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.”

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“To some an extremely sharp picture may be positively painful, for it will perhaps disturb and break the train of thought, whereas a less-defined one would allow the mind to wander at its own sweet will.”

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“The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far.”

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“This beauty ideal is everywhere. You can't escape it - TV, wallpaper, posters, billboards, magazines. They put on these crazy perceptions about what people should look like. It's really shocking the way everybody is striving for this one thing, this ultimate beauty, but what is it?”

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“I don't like taking a sly picture on the side. I like the direct approach. I want to be as honest to myself and the subject as possible. And I'm depending on their humanness to come through.”

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“The relationship I have with my mother now, and photographing her in front of the grave, it opens up discussions, and dealings with the conversations with my mother about, when I was little, how we lived and about suicide and talking about it, so it's something positive, it brought us more together, because people might never discuss that. Some families never go near certain subjects because it's too hurtful or too close or too dangerous. But within doing these photographs, I also wanted to open up a conversation with her about certain things about life.”

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“I don't care about fashion at all. And I know it's kind of a dodgy thing to be a fashion photographer, a kind of pathetic occupation, but I like it, even though I question it.”

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