Best Photograph Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 17

“The photograph annihilates the person.”

Source: The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

“A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.”

Persons Moments Running Originals Photograph Visible Viewers Spatial Configuration Old Photographs

Author:Siegfried Kracauer

“I think you can photograph a certain sliver of human presence in its absence... images taken in the empty rooms, the marks left on the walls, disappearing shadows, etc.”

Thinking Humans Certain Left Rooms Taken Wall Shadow Empty Mark Photograph Disappear Absence Etc Empty Rooms

Author:Mona Kuhn

“I photograph [people] as if photographing flowers.”

People Ifs Flower Photograph

Author:Mona Kuhn

“It seemed clear to me early on that one of the things a photograph could do was make a reality, and I wanted to do that. I always think of looking inside an Easter egg and seeing a perfect world.”

Thinking World Reality Wanted Perfect Clear Seeing Photograph Eggs Easter A Perfect World Easter Egg

Author:Justine Kurland

“There's this way that photography is always about going out searching. I'm not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home.”

Way Kind Home Photography Photographer Photograph Going Out

Author:Justine Kurland

“I drove from New York to California by myself. The iconography of travel and escape is everywhere in my photographs... So actually becoming a runaway was crucial. I had this idea that I'd make my way across the frontier and find my story as it was actually happening in the landscape.”

Way Ideas Stories New York Becoming Happenings Photograph My Way Landscape California Crucial Frontiers Runaway Iconography

Author:Justine Kurland

“We were really poor when I was growing up; my parents, both artists, were bohemians. Life was a desperate struggle, but in service of a high ideal, which is exactly what my photographs are about.”

Artist Parent Poor Struggle Growing Up Growing Ideals Photograph Desperate

Author:Justine Kurland

“My life and work are not separate. I just have more roles than other people. And I have photographs.”

People Roles Photograph

Author:Nikki S. Lee

“When people look at a photograph, they believe it... My photographs crawl along that edge. I document the world, but from my own biased point of view.”

People World Believe Looks My Own Views Photograph Edges Point Of View Documents Biased

Author:Zoe Leonard

“What attracts me in photography is not so much a fine arts approach, but rather photographs as documents... All the ways in which human beings have documented the world in an attempt to order it, in an attempt to consume it or rule it or hang on to it in some sense.”

World Way Humans Art Order Human Beings Fine Approach Photography Photograph Documents Fine Arts

Author:Zoe Leonard

“My photographs tried to find the politicians at their most wary, most vulnerable, and perhaps most truthful moments. I wanted the photographs to reveal the person through stance and stare, when he or she was most reflective or off guard, in order to measure the person and event unfolding.”

Persons Moments Wanted Order Events Politician Photograph Vulnerable Staring Truthful Unfolding Stance

Book:Jerome Liebling: The Minnesota Photographs, 1949-1969

Source: Jerome Liebling: The Minnesota Photographs, 1949-1969

“I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.”

World Art Pleasure Fine Photography Photograph Silly Fine Arts Pretentious Archives Art Photography

Author:Michael Light

“Even in this age of digital manipulation, photographs continue to hold a huge degree of power and meaning. They're beautiful and sad and complicated because every stoppage of time refers to the motion of time.”

Age Beautiful Huge Degrees Photograph Complicated Digital Manipulation

Author:Michael Light

“... anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.”

Knows Cameras Photograph Impression Gravestone

Author:Michael Light

“I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera, a military photographer, or Mike Light really doesn't matter. What matters is the context of the final photograph and the meaning it generates within that context.”

Matter Light Care Military Cameras Finals Photographer Photograph What Matters Mike Astronaut Robotics Authorship

Author:Michael Light

“My pictures are not really about the children that I photograph. They're more like actors in a film. I think you can always recognize the children, but they are alienated from their real appearance and become more like metaphors.”

Thinking Children Real Film Actors Photograph Metaphor Appearance

Author:Loretta Lux

“I still think as a painter - especially in terms of structuring a picture... I carefully choose the models, costumes, requisites, and backdrops of my photographs.”

Thinking Stills Term Models Photograph Painter Costumes Backdrop

Author:Loretta Lux

“I feel totally responsible for what I see. I feel totally responsible for what I photograph.”

Feels Responsible Photograph

Author:Danny Lyon

“During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable.”

World Firsts Long Helping Reality Eternal Photography Cameras Photograph Decades Drawing Stable Exposure Static Unshakable Camera Obscura

Book:The Language of New Media

Source: The Language of New Media

“... if [a photograph is] unbelievably real it becomes superreal or another kind of super real, better than real... [it] also can be, I think, so heartfelt that you almost can get a pang of compassion for the thing.”

Ifs Thinking Kind Real Compassion Photograph Heartfelt

Author:Ralph Eugene Meatyard

“I have always tried to keep truth in my photographs. My work, whether realistic or abstract, has always dealt with a form of religion or imagination.”

Form Imagination Photograph Abstract Realistic

Book:Ralph Eugene Meatyard : the family album of Lucybelle Crater and other figurative photographs

Source: Ralph Eugene Meatyard : the family album of Lucybelle Crater and other figurative photographs

“I work in several different groups of pictures which act on and with each other - ranging from several abstracted manners to a form for the surreal. I have been called a preacher - but, in reality, I'm more generally philosophical. I have never made an abstracted photograph without content. An educated background in Zen influences all of my photographs. It has been said that my work resembles, more closely than any photographer, Le Douanier Rousseau - working in a fairly isolated area and feeding mostly on myself - I feel that I am a primitive photographer.”

“I never take a picture of a face because a face is somebody, an arm is not recognizable as somebody. When you take a photograph of someone's face, it identifies it as somebody, but if you take just a fragment, it's everybody. It's not one person.”

Ifs Persons Faces Arms Photograph Fragments

Author:Annette Messager

“[My work] includes something about death, and about love, because the photos always have something to do with death. The photograph is like taxidermy. It is like the animals I use. They are posed in order to appear to be alive, but they are dead. Their time has passed. The photos have to do with time and loss, and conclusion.”

Use Order Loss Love Is Animal Alive Photograph Conclusion Taxidermy

Author:Annette Messager

“The familiar photographs that many people carry with them always obviously belong to the order of fetishes in the ordinary sense of the word.”

People Order Ordinary Photograph Familiar Fetish

Author:Christian Metz

“Photography is linked with death in many different ways. The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive. But there is another real death which each of us undergoes every day, as each day we draw nearer to our own death. Even when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was has forever vanished.”

Way Persons Stills Different Real Moments Social Memories Practice Forever Alive Photography Draws Photograph Different Ways Each Day That Moment Linked Explicit

Author:Christian Metz

“I never wanted to make portraits - to photograph celebrities, beautiful people, beautiful landscapes, beautiful buildings, or people in distressing situations.... I have always been interested in everyman - average, ordinary people in everyday situations.”

People Wanted Beautiful Situation Building Ordinary Everyday Photograph Average Landscape Portraits Ordinary People Beautiful People Distressing Everyman Beautiful Landscapes

Author:Ray Metzker

“The collection of photographs is a statement about the relationship of my camera and me.”

Cameras Photograph Statements Collections

Author:Ray Metzker

“Merging photographs can be more real than the isolated image because reality is so much more rich than just an isolated moment.”

Real Moments Reality Rich Photograph Isolated Merging

Author:Pedro Meyer

“The photograph as an objective representation of reality simply does not exist. The photograph does not explain to you what is going on to the left or to the right or above or below the frame. Oftentimes, it doesn't even explain to you what is going on inside the frame.”

Doe Reality Left Photograph Objectives Representation

Author:Pedro Meyer

“Before, the myth of photography doesn't lie was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could.”

Ifs I Can Use Reality Used Lying Order Courses Can Do Differences Computer Photography Abuse Photograph Myth Tricks Commit Portraits Manipulate Filters Accommodate I Can Do It Cover Ups

Author:Pedro Meyer

“A photograph is analogous to a plaster cast taken from life, which is always inferior to a good statue.”

Taken Photograph Casts Inferiors Statues Plasters

Author:Jean-Francois Millet

“It's important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation - to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.”

Important Different Used Certain Transformation Photograph Versions

Author:Abelardo Morell

“The spiritual aspect of my work has more to do with the sense that things in the world can be perceived and accepted as being in some respect alive. I try to approach everything that I photograph with this sense of wide-eyed awe.”

World Trying Spiritual Alive Approach Aspect Photograph Wide Accepted Awe

Author:Abelardo Morell

“A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don't care where it's going to go.”

Care Interesting Photograph Don't Care I Don't Care Very Interesting

Author:Abelardo Morell

“I started making photographs as if I were a child myself. This got me to look at things more closely, more slowly, and from vantage points I hadn't considered before.”

Ifs Looks Children Photograph Vantage Point

Author:Abelardo Morell

“... my father loved to take photographs of me. When I was nine I made my own costumes for a school play and I experienced becoming different characters. I loved to document myself as different images and I think my work evolved after this favorite activity. The photographs I exhibited in New York juxtaposed reality and fantasy. There was everyday life and fantasy was dismantling that reality.”

“If you were to ask me to define a photograph in a few words, I would say it is a fossil of light and time.”

Ifs Light Asks Photograph Ask Me Fossils Few Words

Author:Daido Moriyama

“Making a definitive declaration of intent or meaning kills the photograph.”

Photograph Declaration

Author:Daido Moriyama

“I realized eventually that if I was really on top of what I was doing, I should be able to make photographs out of almost anything.”

Ifs Should Able Photograph I Realized

Author:Grant Mudford

“The photograph is always more interesting than what the photograph is of.”

Interesting Photograph

Author:Grant Mudford

“One of the magical things about photography is the transformation that takes place when you photograph something. Something that inherently has very little going for it in terms of the interest you take in it, can become infinitely more interesting when rendered as a photograph. It's no longer a building. It's a photograph.”

Littles Term Interest Interesting Building Photography Transformation Photograph Going For It

Author:Grant Mudford

“My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.”

Firsts Believe Book Ends Gone Trouble Findings Photograph Reactions Wow Spirals Jetty

Author:Vik Muniz

“Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs.”

Tired Photograph Drawing

Author:Vik Muniz

“Perhaps the first photograph ever taken, Niépce's view of the rooftops over Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, was a truly pure photograph. The second one he took, he was already comparing nature to the first photograph he had taken.”

Firsts Views Taken Pure Photograph Saint Compare Rooftops

Author:Vik Muniz

“Never pose your subjects. Let them move about naturally... All great photographs today are snapshots.”

Today Moving Subjects Photograph Snapshots

Author:Martin Munkacsi

“Sometimes, photographs live in our hearts as unborn ghosts and we survive not because their shadows find permanence there, but because that thing that is larger than us, larger than the things we can point to, remember and claim, escorts us from dark into light.”

Heart Sometimes Light Remember Dark Shadow Claims Photograph Ghost Unborn Permanence

Author:Laurel Nakadate

“When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies.... Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me.”

Way Stills Kids Millions Growing Up Growing Mystery Cameras Photograph Video Awe Digital Sixty Documents Kids Growing Up Digital Cameras Mp3

Author:Catherine Opie

“Language is a very complicated thing, and that's one of the reasons why I like making photographs.”

Reason Language Photograph Complicated Reason Why Complicated Things

Author:Catherine Opie

Photograph Quotes

Related topics

Photograph Quotes