Best 11 quotes of William Wegman on MyQuotes

As soon as I got funny, I killed any majestic intentions in my work.

I get so confused about life photography art.

In 1978 I decided not to work with Man Ray as an act of self-discipline. I didn't want to rely on him. Man Ray hated not working, though. He would come into my studio, see me drawing or working on photographs, and just slump down at my feet with a big sigh. Fortunately for both of us the year ended. Polaroid had invented a new camera, the twenty-by-twenty-four, and I was invited to Cambridge, Mass., to experiment with it. Naturally, I took Man Ray and we were working again.

I was born on a tiny cot in southwestern Massachusetts during World War II. A sickly child, I turned to photography to overcome my loneliness and isolation.

I was really relieved not to have to drag something in front of the camera; I could use a pencil and paper. A regular pencil and typing paper. That appealed to me.

I was working with mud and photographs and thread, eyelashes, carrots and acetone... I was throwing radios off buildings and... remember floating styrofoam commas down the Milwaukee River.

My background is in painting but in school in the sixties, like many artists of that time, I believed that painting was dead. I began to work in collaboration with other artists in the creation of performances and installation works. Soon after, I started making video and photographic works and in the process became fascinated with the media itself. Before long I was setting things up just for the camera. In l970 I got a dog and he turned out to be very interested in video and photography as well.

My Weimaraners are perfect fashion models. Their elegant, slinky forms are covered in gray - and gray, everyone knows, goes with anything.

Photography as a subject is a good one. Its history is only about 150 years... You only have to know about twenty-five or thirty names and that's it. All you need. In painting there are more than 1,000.

Sometimes I've drawn on autobiographical material, maybe situations that I've felt trapped by, and turned them into something else, but in a very superficial way. When you find yourself thinking and worrying about certain things they become ridiculous.

When I first started making photo pieces it wasn't with the idea of a commitment to the medium. I didn't think I would have to become a photographer to make my photographs. I recall that anything could be used as material for art in that era. Photography was just one more thing.