Best Photography Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 16

“I'm proposing to you that photography is a language on its own, which is that when you look at images you do derive ideas; and I'm also proposing to you that you can derive ideas without going through words. So I'm forcing you to really look. And this process of looking, it's like a new set of ideas that are being proposed to you.”

Looks Ideas Language Process Photography

Author:Gilles Peress

“I always said it kept me alive - photography - because it did. It was my catharsis.”

Said Alive Photography Catharsis

Author:Bruce Gilden

“All my photographs are about meetings and about coups de foudre - love at first sight. To do that type of photography, one must wipe the canvas clean to prepare for chance encounters, be open and aware to such moments, otherwise it becomes a cliché - already seen and expected.”

Firsts Moments Chance Type Photography Sight Clean Meetings Photograph Expected Encounters Canvas Love At First Sight Wipe Coups Chance Encounters

Author:Edouard Boubat

“No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.”

World Way Art Painting Photography Exciting Dollars Photograph Billions Rational Mediums Art World

Book:Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

Source: Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“Even a fellow with a camera has his favourite subjects, as we can see looking through the Kodak-albums of our friends. One amateur prefers the family group, another bathing scenes, another cows upon an alp, or kittens held upside down in the arms of a black-faced child. The tendency to choose one subject rather than another indicates the photographer's temperament. Nevertheless, his passion is for photography rather than for selection, a kitten will serve when no cows are available.”

“I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe.”

Thinking Spirit Serious Photography Infinite Photograph Woe Mischief

Book:Select Conversations with an Uncle (Now Extinct) and Two Other Reminiscences

Source: Select Conversations with an Uncle (Now Extinct) and Two Other Reminiscences

“It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject.”

“A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.”

Sound Photography Eras Rays Investigation Linguistics New Era Physiological

Author:Roman Jakobson

“In the business of portrait photography, one must combine the artist and the craftsman.”

Artist Photography Portraits Craftsman Portrait Photography

Author:Louis Fabian Bachrach, Jr.

“[Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it...)”

World Art Order Courses Photography Standards Museums Gallery Rejecting Art World

Author:Vito Acconci

“White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.”

Light Next White Color Paper Photography Shadow Apparitions Decomposition Color White

Book:Dieter Appelt

Source: Dieter Appelt

“Don't you think that it is necessary to have a sense of brutality in photography?”

Thinking Photography Brutality

Author:Nobuyoshi Araki

“What makes [photography] obscene is its terrible cruelty. Happiness may be fleeting, but it's the reason we go on living. Photography is the joy that precedes pain, the moment of life just before death.”

May Reason Moments Pain Joy Goes On Terrible Photography Cruelty Fleeting Obscene Moments Of Life Before Death

Author:Nobuyoshi Araki

“You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it.”

Art Born Photography Photographer Classroom

Author:Nobuyoshi Araki

“It's entirely ridiculous and hopeless to try to compete with somebody who made such a huge contribution to photography... I knew when I went into photography that I would be compared to my mother. I thought to myself, what can I do about that?”

Trying Made Would Be Mother Huge Photography Ridiculous Contribution Hopeless

Author:Amy Arbus

“Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump. I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women.”

Children Political Imagination Moral Support Mystery Subjects Missing Photography Adults Regard Distance Critics Males Awe Involving Sinking Nudity Pumps Enchantment Disapproval

Author:J. G. Ballard

“[Photography] tells you that every second in time is different from every other second. You want people to understand that the image in front of them has something to do with the truth, and it can never be repeated.”

People Want Different Fronts Photography Every Second

Author:Roger Ballen

“I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.”

Wanted Seeing Photography Cameras

Author:Lewis Baltz

“I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic.”

Ideas Powerful Essentials Photography Components Begin Again

Author:Lewis Baltz

“I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.”

World Used Photography Distance Powerless Distance Myself

Author:Lewis Baltz

“I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.”

People Art Artist Views Photography Point Of View Minorities

Author:Lewis Baltz

“It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.”

Ifs Thinking Might Film Novel Photography Areas

Author:Lewis Baltz

“Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation.... photographing has become the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter.”

Photography Mediums Visuals Chatter Cellphone Documentation

Author:Geoffrey Batchen

“The main difference seems to be that, whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging is an overtly fictional process. As a practice that is known to be capable of nothing but fabrication, digitization abandons even the rhetoric of truth that has been such an important part of photography's cultural success.”

Has Beens Stills Important Seems Process Differences Known Practice Photography Capable Claims Digital Abandon Rhetoric Objectivity Fabrication Imaging

Book:Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History

Source: Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History

“Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing.”

World Way Humans Differences Seeing Sweet Photography Human Experience Fluid Animated Suspended Homogeneous National Geographic

Author:Geoffrey Batchen

“Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.”

Two Seems Past Media Particular Painting Photography Performances Leaving Decades Boundaries Mediums Sculpture Over The Past

Book:Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History

Source: Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History

“Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for real powers that always originate elsewhere.”

Real Sides Photography Consequence Passages Vehicle Elsewhere Postmodernism Real Power Inconsequential

Author:Geoffrey Batchen

“We live in a time of the greatest precision and of maximum contrasts: photomontage offers us a means to express this. It shows ideas: photography shows us objects.”

Mean Ideas Shows Objects Offers Photography Contrast Maximum Precision

Book:Herbert Bayer: Photographic Works an Exhibition

Source: Herbert Bayer: Photographic Works an Exhibition

“All we did was to turn back the time to a photography of precision which is superior to the human eye.”

Humans Eye Turns Photography Superiors Precision Human Eyes

Author:Bernd Becher

“[X-ray's] accidental discovery in the late 1800s fits seamlessly into modernity's fascination with, and belief in, the power of technological transparency: the desire to domesticate time (cinema), to preserve and capture the surface of the fleeting (photography), to see inside (x-ray).”

Desire Belief Fit Late Photography Discovery Surface Preserves Cinema Capture Rays Technological Fleeting Fascination Transparency Modernity

Author:Walead Beshty

“I'm not particularly invested in, nor do I really care about, photography in a general sense. It's a medium that's relatively ubiquitous, readily accessible, and that I have some facility with, so it makes sense for me to use it.”

Use Care Photography Mediums Make Sense Facility

Author:Walead Beshty

“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

“Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism... and as things turned out, it was.”

Values Enemy Late Photography Modernism

Author:Mel Bochner

“In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic.”

Looks Art Impossible Photography Contemporary Gallery Exhibits Dealer Contemporary Art Art Galleries

Author:Mel Bochner

“There is no other art with as great a democratic capacity as photography.”

Art Photography Capacity Democratic

Author:Manuel Alvarez Bravo

“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

“To some extent, the cult surrounding black-and-white photography is based on nostalgia.”

Black White Photography Nostalgia Black And White Cult Black And White Photography

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

“I turned to photography because I thought it was the dominant language of our culture.”

Culture Language Photography Dominant

Author:Sarah Charlesworth

“I don't think of myself as a photographer. I've engaged questions regarding photography's role in culture... but it is an engagement with a problem rather than a medium.”

Thinking Problem Culture Roles Photography Photographer Mediums Engaged Engagement

Book:Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective

Source: Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective

“I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art.”

People Writing Trying Art Modern Photography Modern Art History Of Photography

Author:Jean-Francois Chevrier

“Photography has not invented anything.”

Photography

Author:Jean-Francois Chevrier

“Many artists, having assimilated the Conceptualists' explorations to varying degrees, have reused the painterly model and use photography, quite consciously and systematically, to produce works that stand alone and exist as photographic paintings.”

Use Artist Produce Painting Degrees Photography Models Exploration Stand Alone

Author:Jean-Francois Chevrier

“It was only with the emergence of the Conceptualist approaches of the late 1960s that the opposition between artists using photography and photographers became explicit.”

Artist Late Approach Photography Photographer Opposition 1960s Emergence Explicit

Author:Jean-Francois Chevrier

“As the possibilities for straightforward photography seem to have become exhausted it has been the photographers who know about the history of art, not simply the history of photography, who have shaped important directions for the future.”

Knows Has Beens Art Important Seems Possibility Photography Photographer Exhausted Straightforward History Of Photography

Author:Van Deren Coke

“Any photographer worth his/her salt - that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagistic bent - can make virtually anything look good. Which means, of course, that she or he can make virtually anything look bad - or look just about any way at all. After all, that is the real work of photography: making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image.”

Way Looks Mean Real Courses Photography Photographer Crafts Salt Bent Real Work Caliber

Author:A. D. Coleman

“... the battle for the acceptance of photography as Art was not only counter-productive but counter-revolutionary. The most important photography is most emphatically not Art.”

Art Important Acceptance Battle Photography Revolutionary Productive

Author:A. D. Coleman

“Photography is, and has been since its conception, a fabulously broad church. Contemporary practice demonstrates that the medium can be a prompt, a process, a vehicle, a collective pursuit, and not just the physical end product of solitary artists' endeavors.”

Has Beens Ends Artist Process Church Practice Products Photography Pursuit Contemporary Mediums Collectives Broads Endeavor Conception Vehicle Solitary Prompts

Author:Charlotte Cotton

“I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there's always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense... This is what drives you to the next picture.”

Thinking Needs Kind Problem Certain Next Perfect Failing Photography Tension Impossibility

Author:Gregory Crewdson

“Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.”

Art Reason Moving Culture Information Painting Photography Democratic Sculpture Back And Forth Installation

Author:Gregory Crewdson

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