“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
—Tom Stoppard

Technique is Overrated

Technique is one of the most important measures of a good craftsperson or artisan, but it may have little to do with good art. Many fine artists demonstrate what might be described as apparently limited technical skills in their very good work, and other artists might demonstrate a virtuoso-like command of a medium in an otherwise mediocre work.

The critical word in the preceding paragraph is “apparently.” Some artists are truly limited by their technical abilities. Many artists, however, learn the intricacies of their media at an early age and abandon them later when a display of technical virtuosity may not enhance a piece.

“If you write deplorable twaddle using surrealist techniques, it will still be deplorable twaddle.”
—Louis Aragon

“I’m not interested in doing any darkroom work to alter the images. What appeals to me about photography is that it’s such a hands-off process. You’re given the image optically and you don’t have to do anything to it. It’s something found out in the world.”
—Lewis Baltz

“I like to play easy things that sound hard.”
—Jeff Beck

“These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence.’ Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”
—Walter Benjamin

“Perfectionism is a kind of neuroticism.”
—John Cleese

“Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.”
—Edgar Degas

“Know-how is useless unless guided by know-why.”
—Andreas Feininger

“The Leica tradition, like any dominant style, endowed its artistic prejudices with an air of inevitability. It located modern experience in the public street. It favored the social over the private, energy over refinement, the eccentric and fragmentary over the carefully controlled whole. It identified artistic skill with athletic agility and fostered the notion that technical craft is at its best a nuisance and at worst a refuge of the timid.”
—Peter Galassi

“One of the things that good art does is parlay a technical constraint into a statement about art itself.”
—Russell Hart

“I met Bill Brandt late in life after admiring many of his images. I realized his main concern was the power of the image irrespective of how it was made. He was no purist about process, a position often frowned on, but for a believer in images this is of no concern.”
—David Hockney

“I believe you should learn the technique and then forget it. You should have it at your fingertips but not in your brain.”
—Lotte Jacobi

“I don’t worry much about making my prints archival. They’ll all outlast me. It’ll give conservators something to do.”
—Victor Landweber

“I know a lot about photography, if nothing about technique.”
—Donald McCullin

“I hate the perfectness of photography; I hate the perfect print.”
—Duane Michals

“Do not allow yourself to be confined by the prejudices and provincialities of your craft.”
—William Mortensen

“With today’s technology mediocre results can be achieved automatically. Unfortunately, mediocrity is all too often confused with success; we are too easily pleased.”
—Beaumont Newhall

“Perfection is sterile. My ideal is not everybody’s perfection.”
—Rudolf Nureyev

“Ars est celare artem.” (Art is to conceal art.)
—Ovid

“Technologies have never been a neutral force.”
—Kevin Robins

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between notes—ah, that is where the art resides.”
—Artur Schnabel

“Artists who say they practice eight hours a day are liars or asses.”
—Andres Segovia

“What better way to get people to look at your ability to compose photographs that are technically and formally sophisticated than to show off with a shape—a penis, a bottom, a nipple, a belly button—that you know has box-office draw? So many photographers that care about composition forget about our boredom, or maybe don’t respect it; they give us formally clever pictures and we yawn.”
—Ingrid Sischy

“A pine forest meticulously photographed on document [fine-grain] film is of interest only to timber merchants.”
—Hans Slomma

“[Is photography art?] is a stupid question. You might just was well as ‘Is painting art?’ The answer is ‘no.’ My feeling is that there is no intrinsic value in materials.”
—Paul Strand

“The work of a complex photographer using simple equipment compares favorably to a simple photographer using complex equipment.”
—Burk Uzzle

“Technique is everything, and it’s nothing. If I get really tired, I fall back on compositional tricks to solve a problem. You can use the rectangle of a camera as a basis for an overly structured photograph.”
—Albert Watson