Best photography & art Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 3

“When I first started making photo pieces it wasn't with the idea of a commitment to the medium. I didn't think I would have to become a photographer to make my photographs. I recall that anything could be used as material for art in that era. Photography was just one more thing.”

Thinking Firsts Art Ideas Used Pieces Materials Photography Commitment Photographer Photograph Mediums Eras Just One Recalls

Author:William Wegman

“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.”

“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

“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.”

“[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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“... 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

“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

“Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.”

Art Seems Clear Environment Photography Definitions Invention Traditional Visuals Multiple Discourse Saturated Visual Images

Book:On the Museum's Ruins

Source: On the Museum's Ruins

“Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen.”

Art Real Photography Democratic Pursuit Mediums Art Photography

Author:Philip Jones Griffiths

“What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art.”

Art Important Moments Views Awareness Return Photography Notion Point Of View Instant Surprising Brief Moments

Author:Raoul Hausmann

“Photography is the art of not pushing the button.”

Art Photography Pushing Buttons

Author:Frank Horvat

“To me, photography is not just a visual art, but something closer to poetry - or at least to some poetry, such as the haiku.”

Art Photography Visuals Haiku Visual Art

Author:Frank Horvat

“There is more in art, with an apology to that much abused word, as applied to photography, than startling display lines, on mounts and signs announcing artist Photographer, Artistic Photography Studio, etc., and the lower the standard the more frantic the claim.”

Art Artist Lines Photography Standards Claims Photographer Studios Artistic Etc Display Apology Frantic Announcing

Author:Gertrude Kasebier

“Fine-art photography is a very small world associated with galleries, museums, and university art programs. It's not like rock music; the products of this world have never been widely seen because the artists are often exploring things that are not already coded in general consciousness. It's not that photographers don't want to be famous, it's just that very few of the views from the edges of culture make the mainstream. Ansel Adams was an exception.”

“That celebrated marriage of science and art, photography, seemed at the time to join together how we look at the world, art, with how we were coming to know it, science.”

Knows World Looks Art Together Photography Art And Science Art Photography

Author:Joseph Kosuth

“Photography, as an invention, was both art and science. The view it gave us of the world was in some measure acceptable because it was a product of our vision of the world; and it did so as part of the same process which seemed to impart 'truth': science.”

World Art Process Views Vision Products Photography Invention Acceptable Impart Art And Science

Author:Joseph Kosuth

“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

“The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash.”

Knows Men World Art Space Painting Photography Stones Originals Filled Painter Variety Clash Mortgage Tokens Suffocating Lease

Author:Sherrie Levine

“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

“Photography, like any other art, is a form of communication. The artist is not blowing bubbles for his own gratification, but is speaking a language, is telling somebody something.”

Art Form Artist Language Communication Photography Art Is Bubbles Gratification

Author:William Mortensen

“Photography does not form a separate, barren field of art. It is only a means of execution, uniform, rapid and sure, which serves the artist by reproducing with mathematical precision the form and effect of objects and even that poetry which at once arises from any harmonious combination.”

Mean Doe Art Form Artist Effects Fields Objects Photography Arise Mathematical Combination Execution Uniforms Rapids Harmonious Precision Barren Reproducing

Author:Charles Negre

“If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854)”

Ifs Art Photography Art Is Poetic Interpretation Translations Complement Exactitude

Author:Charles Negre

“I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.”

World Art Done Feelings Eye Form Growing Progress Modern Painting Photography Related Sculpture Tempo Modern Science Best Art

Book:Paul Outerbridge, Jr: photographs

Source: Paul Outerbridge, Jr: photographs

“As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.”

Art Desire Photography Stable Ephemeral Transitory

Book:Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture

Source: Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture

“Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government.”

Firsts Art Use Government Artist Photography Photographer Art Photography

Author:Rondal Partridge

“Let us... leave art to the artists, and let us try to use the medium of photography to create photographs that can endure because of their photographic qualities.”

Trying Art Use Artist Quality Photography Endure Photograph Mediums

Book:Albert Renger-Patzsch: joy before the object

Source: Albert Renger-Patzsch: joy before the object

“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

“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

“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

“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.”

“... 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

“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

“For photography to be an art involves reformulating notions of art, rejecting both material and formal purism and also the separation of art from commerce as distinct semiotic practices that never interlock.”

Art Practice Materials Photography Notion Separation Commerce Formal Rejecting Semiotics

Book:Readings and writings: semiotic counter-strategies

Source: Readings and writings: semiotic counter-strategies

“I am suspicious and disillusioned about the uses and misuses of photography in the art world, the press, and the world of entertainment. And to make things more complicated, I don't think that the general public is well educated regarding images. Generally we are taught how to read, but we are not taught how to look.”

Thinking World Wells Looks Art Use Taught Photography Presses Entertainment Complicated Educated Suspicious Art World Misuse General Public Disillusioned Well Educated

Author:Alfredo Jaar

“We struggle against easel painting not because it is an aesthetic form of painting, but because it is not modern, for it does not succeed in bringing out the technical side, it is a redundant, exclusive art, and cannot be of any use to the masses. Hence we are struggling not against painting but against photography carried out as if it were an etching, a drawing, a picture in sepia or watercolor.”

Ifs Doe Art Use Form Sides Struggle Modern Painting Succeed Photography Mass Drawing Aesthetic Exclusive Redundant Watercolors Etching

Author:Alexander Rodchenko

“As a senior in high school my counselor recommended that I soften my science and math direction with an art course. Fortunately my high school offered a new course in B&W photography, so I opted for that instead of art, towards which I had an aversion. Composition is something that comes pretty naturally to me and I appreciate ordered chaos: the photo class turned out to be fun.”

Art School Courses Fun Class Photography High School Appreciate Chaos Math Composition Senior Aversion Counselor High School Senior

Author:Peter Menzel

“If you take pictures does that make you an art thief?”

Ifs Doe Art Photography Thieves

Author:Bill Jay

“Only in art can you make something that no one wants and still be considered successful.”

Want Art Stills Successful Photography

Author:Bill Jay

“What inspires me still: travel, art, photography, my kids, the places I haven't been to yet.”

Art Stills Kids Havens Inspire Photography Art Photography

Author:Jillian Barberie

“The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.”

Art Stills Problem Form Photography Art Is Complexes Contests Art History

Author:Garry Winogrand

“It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.”

Needs Art Imagination Vision Learning Photography Ordinary Extraordinary Photographer Photograph Invention Painter Photography By Photographers Inspirational Photography Great Photography Street Photography Art Photography Good Photography

Author:David Bailey

“In the last workshop I taught, a woman flew in from Thailand. She's a medical doctor in Bangkok. I asked her in her one-on-one session where she wanted photography to be in her life.Did she want a second career? Was it about earning money? Or was it art? And she said "None of those. I want photography to be serious in my life." It would be like someone wanting music, like piano playing, to be a richer, deeper, and maybe even harder experience.”

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Photography Quotes