“I’ve come to look askance at the way photography is done today, with people making thousands and thousands of pictures. As I look back on other people’s work—and I’ve come to know a lot of photographers’ work by now—it seems that even the best of them don’t make many good pictures. Look at Garry Winogrand, who made those extraordinary things—he had maybe a hundred great photos in him, but he made a million.”
—Richard Benson

Quantity versus Quality

Is there a relationship between the volume of artwork an artist produces and the quality of that work?

Not necessarily.

Finding the relationship between quantity and quantity is one of those formulae that’s always eluded theoreticians for a very good reason: there is no such relationship. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Arnold Schönberg have earned their towering reputations from a relatively small body of work. Other artists also described as great were so prolific one wonders when they found time to eat and sleep.

“Of making many books there is no end.”
—King Solomon

“It’s difficult to take more than six great pictures a year.”
—David Bailey

“I asked him [Garry Winogrand] if he felt bad about missing pictures when he reloaded. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘there are no pictures when I reload.’ ”
—Mason Resnick

“I think [photography] is the hardest medium in which to have a personal vision. That’s because competency is available to everybody. Someone who has never made a painting before is not likely to make a competent painting. But almost anybody, picking up any kind of camera, aiming it for the first time, if they follow the directions etched on the back of a Brownie, will get something pretty reasonable. I don’t believe in accidental masterpieces, but I have stood in photo labs and watched prints coming out of the computerized process machine, and, you know, one out of every 150 prints is damned good. Once you get past competency, it’s very hard to make the way you pick up that instrument be different from the way someone else picks up the instrument.”
—Chuck Close

“There’s a right size for every idea.”
—Henry Moore

“Get to work. Your wife loves you; and don’t let anybody tell you how much work you should do or how to make art.”
—Harry Callahan

“The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the only function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece. No other task is of any consequence.”
—Cyril Connolly

“The thing that interests me about photography, and why it’s different from all other media, is that it’s the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece. You cannot make an accidental masterpiece if you’re a painter or a sculptor.”
—Chuck Close

“The manuscript in the drawer either rots or ripens.”
—Maria von Ebner-Eschenback

“Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.”
—Gioacchino Rossini

“Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.”
—Pablo Picasso