Best Photography Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 20

“You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it.”

World Whole Fronts Photography Cameras Photograph Whole World

Author:Thomas Ruff

“In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.”

Subjects Photography Mediums

Author:Thomas Ruff

“Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.”

Able Language Photography Symbolic Symbolism

Author:Sebastiao Salgado

“I am interested in marginality, in immaturity, in naïveté, in illusion, in fictions, in transitions, in the fact that at a certain moment in life there is no limit. I would like my photography to pose a question rather than make a precise statement.”

Moments Facts Certain Fiction Limits Photography Illusion Statements Transition Precise Immaturity Vets

Author:Lise Sarfati

“The most striking feature of the new is the sheer mass. Photography was previously a mass phenomenon, but now, quantity is doubtless the outstanding quality. For a long time photos have been taken frequently and everywhere, but now photos are taken permanently and everywhere,... What is new is that we can watch them practically in real time.”

Long Has Beens Real Quality Watches Taken Photography Mass Long Time Features Phenomenon Quantity Sheer Outstanding

Author:Joachim Schmid

“For the first time in the history of photography, we can study the real-time production of snapshot making - globally! (On Flickr and other photosharing websites)”

Firsts Real Study Photography First Time Productions Website Snapshots Flickr History Of Photography

Author:Joachim Schmid

“Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.”

Promise Photography Anarchy Mastery

Author:Allan Sekula

“Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.”

World Littles Social Understanding Mountain Photography Evidence Terror Critical Envy Nostalgia Genre Documentaries Documentary Photography

Book:Dismal science: photo works, 1972-1996

Source: Dismal science: photo works, 1972-1996

“How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?”

Doe Social Memories Photography Historical Photograph Transformed Power Relationships

Book:Fish story

Source: Fish story

“I'm not modest about myself. I know for a fact that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put things together. I expound vociferously to students of architecture and photography, the significance of design. A photograph is a design in which you assemble thoughts in your mind.”

Knows Mind I Can Facts Together Design Students Photography Photograph Architecture Significance Modest

Author:Julius Shulman

“And I was very successful at baby photography... Strange isn't it? Because some of my portraits of babies were - I used dramatic lighting, shadow lighting, and I didn't use flash. We didn't have flash in those days, we just had floodlights, and I was photographing babies as I would an object - an inanimate object, for that matter.”

Matter Use Used Successful Objects Strange Baby Photography Shadow Dramatic Flash Portraits Lighting Inanimate Objects

Author:Julius Shulman

“It's all the same. It's the same face. We always look for an idea, for the same face, for the same position. There is no such thing as a European or an African photography. It's all the same thing.”

Looks Ideas Faces Position Photography Same Face

Author:Malick Sidibe

“If I have caught myself struggling to remember, it was, if not a pretense, at least premature, in that I only ever used photography for my own pleasure - even if I then bewailed the vanished pleasure which my pictures brought back to me.”

Ifs Remember Used My Own Pleasure Struggle Photography Caught Pretense Premature

Author:Jeanloup Sieff

“All aspects of photography interest me and I feel for the female body the same curiosity and the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case, the nude is a form of landscape. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model.”

Feels Reason Moments Body Faces Form Interest Cases Depends Photography Models Female Aspect Curiosity Photograph Mood Landscape No Reason Female Body Same Love

Author:Jeanloup Sieff

“There is no truth in photography. One can't reproduce an absolute truth. That said, I don't see [my photographs] as being any less truthful than any other photographs.”

Said Photography Absolutes Photograph Truthful Absolute Truth

Author:Taryn Simon

“Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused... this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences.... Photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.”

Beautiful Ability Fiction Quality Photography Consequence Compelling Severe Ambiguity Blur Misused

Author:Taryn Simon

“Photography's history is bound to the mistake, to the accident.”

Mistake Photography Bounds Accidents

Author:Taryn Simon

“The photograph doesn't claim to be a participant, or to know, or to be a club member of whatever it's documenting - photography is more demanding when it doesn't pretend to know.”

Knows Members Photography Claims Photograph Clubs Participants

Author:Taryn Simon

“I'm designing a seductive frame to attract an audience to a subject they would otherwise ignore. And that's what I do in all of my photography - give a stage to things that wouldn't normally receive that stage.”

Giving Audience Subjects Stage Design Photography Seductive

Author:Taryn Simon

“Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.”

Kind Ideas Belief Process Fantasy Photography Illusion Theater Foundation Myth Relate Layers Intervention Complication Simulation

Author:Taryn Simon

“Photography, to me, is the dewdrop that reflects my inner and outer worlds simultaneously.”

World Photography Outer Worlds

Author:Raghubir Singh

“I consider myself fortunate that photography exists, because otherwise I'd be stuck in the tragedy of ephemeralness that can come with installation art.”

Art Photography Tragedy Stuck Fortunate Installation

Author:Sandy Skoglund

“I think I'm really fortunate to be an installation artist who is heavily invested in photography: I don't have the emotional problems with the loss of work that some installation artists have. The photographs wouldn't exist without the installation... but at the same time, I think I'd kill myself if I only did installations. There's something deeply tragic about doing work that you know is temporal.”

Ifs Thinking Knows Problem Artist Loss Emotional Photography Photograph Fortunate Tragic Installation Emotional Problems

Author:Sandy Skoglund

“To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.”

Has Beens Art Subjects Photography Transformation Depth Photograph Available Spectators

Author:Michael Snow

“I think it's all absolute nonsense how people talk about photography as being an art. It's a very menial career that you do if you draw badly. Now they teach it at the Royal College of Art and get grand about it. It's the only course there that I don't understand.”

People Ifs Thinking Art Courses Careers Teach College Photography Draws Absolutes Nonsense Royal

Author:Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon

“If there is a good thing about photography, it is that it can be easily enjoyed.”

Ifs Photography Good Things Enjoyed

Author:Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon

“Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.”

Art Term Photography Contemporary Mainstream Exhausted Mining Contemporary Art Art Photography

Author:Abigail Solomon-Godeau

“In the final analysis, photography... is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.”

Photography Gun Finals Analysis

Author:Abigail Solomon-Godeau

“... photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself.”

Made Self Film Photography Mark Cameras Photograph Video Makers Clicks Shutters

Author:Abigail Solomon-Godeau

“Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.”

“I got into photography because of the immediacy of the medium. I used to sit in front of a canvas for weeks trying to create something. Now I can see the image right away.”

Trying I Can Used Week Fronts Photography Mediums Canvas Immediacy

Author:Mario Sorrenti

“Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.”

Real Photography Real Life Surfing

Author:Alec Soth

“[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.”

Way Photography Related

Author:Alec Soth

“There are only two hard things in photography; which way to point the camera and when to release the shutter.”

Way Two Hard Photography Cameras Release Hard Things Shutters

Author:Ralph Steiner

“There is no such thing as the perfect picture. That's the challenge of photography. I was always striving for perfection, even though I knew I could never achieve it. But it kept me reaching for something.”

Challenges Perfect Achieve Photography Perfection Strive Reaching Striving For Perfection

Author:Phil Stern

“Photography has always been capable of manipulation. Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it's an interpretation. I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame. You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. There's an infinite number of ways you can do this: photographs have always been authored.”

People World Way Persons Two Facts Left Can Do Numbers Degrees Photography Capable Thirds Murder Infinite Cameras Photograph Subtle Manipulation Interpretation Homeless Third Person

Author:Joel Sternfeld

“The similarity between Van Gogh, Haiku poetry, and good photography is the concern for mortality. That things are very fleeting, that there are people who are more sensitive to death than others. The threat of time is of great concern to them. And the camera is a very appropriate instrument for many.”

People Photography Concern Cameras Instruments Threat Sensitive Appropriate Mortality Fleeting Vans Similarity Haiku Good Photography

Author:Dennis Stock

“... photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.”

Looks Art Interest Photography Mediums Awful Participants Typewriters

Author:Ezra Stoller

“Photography is space, light, texture, of course, but the really important element is time - that nanosecond when the image organizes itself on the ground glass.”

Important Light Courses Space Elements Photography Glasses Organize Texture

Author:Ezra Stoller

“[I]n general, my work is less about expanding the possibilities of photography than about re-investing it with a truer perception of things by returning to a simple method, one that photography had from the beginning of its existence.”

Simple Existence Possibility Perception Photography Method Investing Expanding

Author:Thomas Struth

“The portrait is the subject matter in photography where the problems of the media are the most visible.”

Matter Problem Subjects Media Photography Visible Portraits Subject Matter

Author:Thomas Struth

“I think the best way to put it is that newspictures are the noun and the verb; our kind of photography is the adjective and adverb. The newspicture is a single frame; ours, a subject viewed in series. The newspicture is dramatic, all subject and action. Ours shows what's back of the action.”

Thinking Way Kind Shows Action Subjects Photography Series Best Way Dramatic Verbs Adjectives Nouns Adverbs Adjectives And Adverbs

Author:Roy Stryker

“I don't like the discussions about whether photography is an art. Even though I think that if it would be just a craft I would not have stayed with it all my life.”

Ifs Thinking Art Would Be Photography Crafts Discussion

Author:Josef Sudek

“Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography - to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging.... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.”

Thinking Giving Moments Reality Literature Interesting Fiction Photography Wings Following Observation Description That Moment Let It Go Staging

Author:Larry Sultan

“In this, photography is the same thing as love. When my gaze, diving into the sea as my subject, converges with the act of photography, hot sparks fly at the point of intersection.”

Sea Subjects Photography Hot Sparks Diving Intersections

Author:Shomei Tomatsu

“In short, [photography] is a matter of turning loneliness into thoughts.”

Matter Loneliness Photography

Author:Shomei Tomatsu

“Photography means releasing oneself from one type of gravity and placing oneself in a space where a different force is trying to move you.”

Trying Mean Different Moving Force Space Type Photography Oneself Gravity

Author:Shomei Tomatsu

“Poetry is my first love. Photography often fails to look into things. It looks at things. Poetry is so much more truthful.”

Firsts Looks Failing Photography Poetry Is Truthful First Love Photography Love

Author:Larry Towell

“Photography is my method for defining the confusing world that rushes constantly toward me. It is my defensive attempt to reduce our daily chaos to a set of understandable images.”

World Photography Method Chaos Confusing Defining

Author:Arthur Tress

“Perhaps why so much of today's photography doesn't grab us or mean anything to our personal lives is that it fails to touch upon the hidden life of the imagination and fantasy, which is hungry for stimulation.”

Mean Today Life Is Imagination Fantasy Failing Photography Hungry Personal Life Stimulation

Author:Arthur Tress

Photography Quotes

Related topics

Photography Quotes