Quotes by
Robert Rauschenberg

Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.

You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.

Photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts.

I like photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall... The point is to be uninteresting.

I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone’s imagination.

Whatever is there [in the camera’s eye] is a truth, but a truth you have to believe in. What you see in front of you is a fact. You click when you believe it’s the truth.

My preoccupation in 1949 with photography was supported by a personal conflict between curiosity and shyness. The camera functioned as a social shield. In 1981 I think of the camera as my permission to walk into every shadow...

The eye that looks for perfection is the one that is anticipating a controlled retirement (no matter what the age).

I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the Work is the word.

I’m quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it’s not necessarily my intention.

If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.

I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is.

Photography is an economical instant studio that travels well.

My fascination with images open 24 hrs. is based on the complex interlocking if disparate facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliché. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object freightways by this I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built in...

I don’t crop. Photography is like diamond cutting. If you miss you miss.

[Photography is] an excuse to look deliberately, contemplatively, at every shadow or every crack on the wall, or everything that’s too Baroque and confusing to see at once. I guess the closest I come to anything like notebook sketches, to making studies, is taking photographs.

The reason that I started using found photographs early on was because I couldn’t go everywhere. And now I’ve worked my life in such a way that I’ve already nearly been everywhere, so I don’t have to have a secondhand viewpoint.

One gets as much information as a witness of activity from a fleeting glance, like a quick look, sometimes in motion, as one does staring at the subject. Because even if you remain stationary, your mind wanders, and it’s that kind of activity that I would like to get into the photograph.