15 Quotes by Burton Silverman

Alas, it is just a single image – an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality.

We do not see everything in the environment in the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in fact, prioritize our seeing.

I hope that we can bridge the worlds of appearances and of insights, and thus rescue art from triviality, from ‘sensation’ alone.

I am wedded to who I am.

In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people?

Artists must literally go into a zone of intense seeing so the subjective and objective almost fuse together.