Best Photograph Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 15

“[When I photograph] I project what I'm not. What I would like to be.”

“All of us tend to look at photographs as if we are simply gazing through a two-dimensional window onto some outside world. This is almost a perceptual necessity; in order to see what the photograph is of, we must first repress our consciousness of what the photograph is.”

Ifs World Firsts Looks Two Order Consciousness Window Photograph Outside World Gazing

Author:Geoffrey Batchen

“There is no photograph more inherently photographic than another.”

Photograph

Author:Walead Beshty

“I always wanted my photographs to challenge the status quo, to contest the kinds of images that existed in popular culture.”

Kind Wanted Culture Challenges Photograph Contests Status Quo Popular Culture

Author:Dawoud Bey

“While I have devised various formal strategies for articulating [my] concerns, I think fundamentally the work is driven by a basic curiosity. I seek to find out things about people by making photographs of them.”

People Thinking Concern Strategy Curiosity Photograph Various Driven Formal Articulating

Author:Dawoud Bey

“Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (Title of a 16x20 inch photograph depicting an index card on which that phrase is handwritten.)”

Ideas Records Photography Photograph Cards Titles Phrases Abstract Inches

Author:Mel Bochner

“You see in the photograph what you are.”

Photograph

Book:Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography

Source: Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography

“In a sense, photographs are highly literary, and the photographer, like the writer, has to be both a master of craft and a visionary. Patient accumulation of facts and then speculation about their meaning is the nature of authorship in both mediums.”

Facts Masters Patient Photographer Photograph Mediums Crafts Speculation Accumulation Visionaries Authorship

Author:Peter C Bunnell

“In photography, the issue of the integration of form and content is exceptionally difficult because of the widely held belief that photographs must be a kind of vicarious experience of the subject itself.”

Kind Form Belief Difficult Issues Subjects Photography Photograph Integration Vicarious

Book:Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography

Source: Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography

“The nineteenth-century way of looking at the photograph was as a mirror for the memory, and at that time the photographs almost looked like mirrors, with their polished metallic surfaces.”

Way Memories Century Mirrors Photograph Surface Nineteenth Century Polished Metallic

Book:Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography

Source: Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography

“Photographs freed from the scientific bias can, and indeed usually do, have double meanings, implied meanings, unintended meanings, can hint and insinuate, and may even mean the opposite of what they apparently mean.”

May Mean Opposites Photograph Bias Hints Implied Double Meaning

Book:Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography

Source: Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography

“The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude.”

Reality Identity Scene Photograph Attributes Wholeness Favour Projection Refusal Coherence Plenitude

Author:Victor Burgin

“Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.”

Photograph Conviction Complicity

Book:Thinking photography

Source: Thinking photography

“The only pertinent political question in relation to an identity [or its photograph] is not Is it really coherent? but What does it actually achieve?”

Doe Political Achieve Identity Relation Photograph Pertinent

Author:Victor Burgin

“Even the uncaptioned art photograph is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other.”

Art Moments Language Memories Photograph Association

Author:Victor Burgin

“A photograph is a moment when you press the button. It will never come back.”

Moments Presses Photograph Buttons

Author:Rene Burri

“I wanted not to make photographs that would be art, but art that would be photography.”

Art Would Be Wanted Photography Photograph

Author:Jean-Marc Bustamante

“To live in a world of photographs is to live in a world of substitutes... or so it seems, whose actual referent is always the other, the described, the reality of a world once removed. I prefer, on the other hand, to look at the photographs as something real and of my world, a strange and powerful thing... part of a language, a system of communication, an economy of signs.”

World Looks Real Hands Reality Seems Language Powerful Economy Strange Communication Photograph Substitutes Something Real

Book:Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective

Source: Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective

“I always felt that when I was photographing, I had a psychic need to see this, to photograph this. And I think if somebody else had been doing this work, and if I could have seen these pictures anywhere at all, then there would have been no need to make them.”

Ifs Thinking Needs Has Beens Felt Photograph If I Could Psychics

Author:Larry Clark

“I affirm that any sort of photograph is superior to any sort of painting aiming at the same result.”

Results Painting Photograph Superiors

Author:Alvin Langdon Coburn

“What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look - at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.”

Looks Made Moments Shows Particular Tools Photographer Photograph Employing

Book:Depth of field: essays on photography, mass media, and lens culture

Source: Depth of field: essays on photography, mass media, and lens culture

“The simple fact is this: There are no neutral photographs.”

Facts Simple Photograph

Book:Depth of field: essays on photography, mass media, and lens culture

Source: Depth of field: essays on photography, mass media, and lens culture

“The past is always with us, in the form of our photographs, which we feel as we might a rosary, wearing them smooth with the fingering of our eyes.”

Feels Might Eye Past Form Photograph Smooth Rosary

Author:A. D. Coleman

“We've spent now about 150 years trying to convince ourselves that photographs are reliable evidence, some unimpeachable slice of the real world. That was a myth from the very beginning.”

World Trying Years Real Evidence Photograph Myth Convince Real World

Author:A. D. Coleman

“It is no coincidence that one cardinal rule in brainwashing is to remove from the victim all photographs of himself and people he has known.”

People Known Victim Photograph Remove Coincidence Cardinals Brainwashing Cardinal Rules

Author:A. D. Coleman

“The principal thing is the question of how our culture views age: that old is ugly. Take a photographer like Mapplethorpe. Every single photograph of his is about classical notions of beauty, of young beautiful black men, young beautiful women, and he selects subjects who are essentially interesting and good-looking and extremely physical. I can't stand them.”

Men I Can Age Beautiful Young Culture Black Interesting Views Subjects Notion Photographer Photograph Ugly Principal Looking Good Beautiful Women

Book:A Body

Source: A Body

“My photographs recall the memories of the human race.”

Humans Memories Race Photograph Human Race Recalls

Author:John Coplans

“The internet does not adhere to the inherent, necessary asymmetry of high-versus-low-art categorizations that we use in the cultural sector: in a banal sense, all photographs on the Web are orphans ready to be claimed.”

Doe Art Use Ready Internet Lows Photograph Inherent Versus Orphan Categorization Asymmetry

Author:Charlotte Cotton

“All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I'm looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery.”

Want My Own Answers Mystery Remains Photograph Interiors

Author:Gregory Crewdson

“The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.”

Desire Strange Longing Photograph Aliens Landscape Internals Repression Angst Exotic

Author:Gregory Crewdson

“[Cindy Sherman's] photographs reverse the terms of art and autobiography. They use art not to reveal the artist's true self but to show the self as an imaginary construct. There is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; there are only the guises she assumes. And she does not create these guises; she simply chooses them in the way that any of us do.”

Way Doe Art Real Self Use Shows Artist Term Assuming Photograph Imaginary Reverse Autobiography True Self Constructs Guise Cindy

Author:Douglas Crimp

“They were just snapshots, nothing special, nothing particularly artistic. They were used for utility purposes. (On photographs of mundane streetscapes he had Stanley Something-or-other take in Sacramento in 1988 to serve as backgrounds to his cartoons. People don't draw it, all this crap, people don't focus attention on it because it's ugly, it's bleak, it's depressing... But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life. )”

“I've always found paintings of nudes depressing because they can't compete with photographs. The grainiest photograph of some girl, a blurry Polaroid - you'd rather look at that than the Venus de Milo, because you think, Wow, that's really somebody... This camera really was in front of this real naked lady.”

Thinking Looks Real Girl Found Fronts Painting Cameras Photograph Naked Wow Depressing Venus Blurry Polaroids Venus De Milo

Author:John Currin

“The older I get, the one thing I can trust in myself more than anything else is the way I feel about something. When I photograph I try to be as aware of my feelings as I can be to somehow try and get them out of me and onto the film in terms of the way I am responding or seeing the world.”

World Way Feels Trying I Can Feelings Film Term Seeing One Thing Photograph Responding Seeing The World

Book:Judy Dater, twenty years

Source: Judy Dater, twenty years

“A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being.”

Reason Process Illusion Photograph

Author:Roy DeCarava

“I try to photograph things that are near to me because I work best among things I know. I'm not concerned with startling anyone or discovering new forms; formal qualities are only tools to help state my message.”

Knows Trying States Helping Form Quality Messages Concerned Tools Photograph Discovering Formal

Book:Roy DeCarava, a retrospective

Source: Roy DeCarava, a retrospective

“Things just enter reality through photographs.”

Reality Photograph

Author:Thomas Demand

“[With my photographs] you have a [single, forever fixed] moment and my particular angle of vision. My tyrannical condition, as it were, is that I prescribe your vision.”

Moments Vision Forever Conditions Particular Photograph Fixed Angle

Author:Thomas Demand

“Photographs are detonators. They explode in us. We are the gaze as well as the gazed-at. The observer and the observed.”

Wells Photograph Observers

Author:Edmundo Desnoes

“Photographs offer more than decisive moments. They are not alone, they add and subtract and change with time. They are metaphors for our lives... Even a static photograph can change in the blink of a day or decade.”

Moments Our Lives Offers Add Photograph Metaphor Decades Not Alone Static Blink Decisive Moments

Author:Edmundo Desnoes

“The documentation about the work isn't of real importance to me either. I've done lots of works without taking photographs.”

Real Done Importance Photograph Documentation

Author:Jan Dibbets

“I don't look for things to see how they function as metaphors.... You can't photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.”

Looks Function Photograph Metaphor Traffic Sublime Symbolic

Author:John Divola

“To photograph is often compared to an act of redemption - to select from an infinite number of choices that which is to be remembered.”

Choices Numbers Infinite Photograph Redemption Remembered Select

Book:Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin

Source: Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin

“The photograph as an object has a relationship to that which it represents something like the relationship the snake skin has to the snake that sheds it.”

Objects Skins Photograph Shed Snakes

Author:John Divola

“In all my work there's this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can't make the sublime itself.”

Notion Photograph Sublime

Author:John Divola

“Subject matter comes to you, you don't go to it... Although I shoot extemporaneously a lot of the time, I prefer to have half a dozen shots in my mind. Probably I have seen them many times under different conditions and I have been thinking about them. The moment shall come when I shall go back to them and make the photographs.”

Thinking Mind Has Beens Different Matter Moments Half Conditions Subjects Shots Photograph Dozen Subject Matter

Author:Max Dupain

“[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation.”

Looks Home Lost Taken Gun Towns Method Photograph Flight Shops Weekend Investigation Tickets Small Town Martians Memphis Haphazard Thoroughness

Author:Geoff Dyer

“Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other.”

Impossible Photograph Follow Up

Author:William Eggleston

“I don't look at other photographs much at all. I don't know why. I study my own a lot.”

Knows Looks My Own Study Photograph

Author:William Eggleston

“I try to photograph what can't be photographed - psychological or subjective reality, which seems more real than physical or consensual reality.”

Trying Real Reality Seems Photograph Psychological Subjective

Author:Barbara Ess

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Photograph Quotes