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Photography Quotes

Browse 3249 quotes about Photography.

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Photography Quotes

“At birth we begin to discover that shapes, sounds, lights, and textures have meaning. Long before we learn to talk, sounds and images form the world we live in. All our lives, that world is more immediate than words and difficult to articulate. Photography, reflecting those images with uncanny accuracy, evokes their associations and our instant conviction. The art of the photographer lies in using those connotations, as a poet uses the connotations of words and a musician the tonal connotations of sounds.”

WorldLongArtUseLightFormLyingDifficultSoundOur LivesPoetBirthShapesPhotographyMusicianPhotographerConvictionInstantAssociationReflectingTextureAccuracyEvokeConnotationUncanny
Author:Nancy Newhall
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“The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.”

ArtProblemEyeFilmCasesSpecialPaintingPridePhotographyBasesCamerasVideoMediumsDominantExtensionsNineteenVerdictWitheredPictorialExemption
Author:Peter Schjeldahl
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“I feel very lucky. I don't know what else there has to be. I'm happy, as corny as it sounds, to be living in a place where it's easy to live, easy to drive to the airport, easy to go pick up something at the supermarket and to have a circle of friends. Those were my goals in 1998, not to be queen of photography but to make a cultural adjustment to the West. And those are still more important goals to me than professional ones right now.”

KnowsFeelsStillsImportantEasySoundGoalRight NowLuckyPhotographyPicksWestCirclesQueensAirportsCornyAdjustmentSupermarketsCircle Of Friends
Author:Andrea Modica
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“By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression.”

HeartArtMadeSelfWholePossibilityObjectsExpressionPhotographyConceptsOriginalsIndividualityCopiesAestheticOriginalityGesturesUniquenessStereotypeRepetitionSelf ExpressionExposingMultiplicityCoherence
Author:Rosalind E. Krauss
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“... photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to the thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches.”

WorldRealWaterTreePaintingColdPhotographyTablesPhotographGlassesTrackConnectedDrawingRingsBeachMaskPrintPalmsSculptureParallelsTransfersFootprintFingerprintsShroudsGulls
Author:Rosalind E. Krauss
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“Photography's vaunted capture of a moment in time is the seizure and freezing of presence. It is the image of simultaneity, of the way that everything within a given space at a given moment is present to everything else; it is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the real.”

WayRealMomentsGivenSpaceIntegrityPhotographyCaptureDeclarationMoments In TimeFreezingSeizuresSeamless
Book:The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths
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“The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon [the] possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.”

WorldWayGivingHumansPhilosophyFacesFormLeftChanceHuman BeingsPossibilityRevolutionPhotographyTasksDespiteSignificance
Book:Towards a Philosophy of Photography
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“So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but a human wish, intensifying since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation - a wish for power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another... Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the act of reproduction.”

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Author:Stanley Cavell
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“In my years of photography I have learned that many things can be sensed, seen, shaped, or resolved in a realm of quiet, well in advance of, or between, the actual clicking of shutters and the sloshing of films and papers in chemical solutions. I work to attain a state of heart, a gentle space offering inspirational substance that could purify one's vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of the spirit.”

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Author:Paul Caponigro
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