Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Richard Benson.
“I’ve always believed and I continue to believe that the elite of the world are the people who make things. And the lower class are the people who think, dwell on their thoughts and exchange ideas.” – Richard Benson
“I believe art, pieces of art, are pieces of understanding that you can’t render in any form other than the physical form in which you make the piece of art.” – Richard Benson
“The difference between an artist and a craftsman is that a craftsman is interested in his or her tools and an artist disdains them.” – Richard Benson
“I think nothing is more boring than to spend your time figuring out how to make a thing absolutely beautifully. I think you should make a thing as well as you need to make it to make it carry across the thing you’re trying to make clear and no better.” – Richard Benson
“The worst possible thing you can do is to waste your energy trying to get all the little tiny bits and pieces right because when you get all those right the important things are wrong. So whenever I make something I just try to get the big issues roughly correct. I have no interest in getting the little things all precise.” – Richard Benson
“If you try to reproduce a picture you can’t get it to be the same. If you can’t make it the same what you have to do is you’ve got to figure out what’s important about the thing. And you have to figure out the means by which the important thing is made clear in the original object. And you have to figure out what the new means are by which you can make the thing clear in the new context.” – Richard Benson
“I think there’s a real problem because we overintellectualize the things we make as artists and it’s compounded by the fact that today there is sort of a current idea that the thing about art is the way it’s about art.” – Richard Benson
“What can be more interesting than trying to make a picture or some thing that says something about the human condition – not the art condition. I’m interested in the human condition – not the art condition” – Richard Benson
“There is a great lesson in this for photographers of today who dedicate themselves to one project or another, failing to understand that the best work might come from an obsession with the medium rather than the personally oriented choice of what might be done with it. Lee always has a camera with him and is constantly making pictures. How much better the work of today might be if all the young and dedicated photographers took up this habit.” – Richard Benson
“This thing about technology as time changes is a really interesting thing. And how we keep trying to do good things with it is really complicated. I believe that the way in which we lived in the past was a way that lent itself to the tremendous kind of achievement concentrated in a single thing like a painting. And I believe the way we live now does not lead us to that. That is what I think is sad. Instead it leads us to photographs, where we have thousands of them and it seems to me that on a very basic level the effort is diluted over this broader area.” – Richard Benson
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Find out more about Richard Benson here.