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Photography Quotes

Browse 3249 quotes about Photography.

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Photography Quotes

“Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.”

PeopleIfsKnowsWorldWantLooksMeanEnoughUseCareCommonVisionKnow HowAliveAchievePhotographyPhotographWorthlessIf You CarePictorial
Author:Paul Strand
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“The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.”

BelieveMeanDoeArtImportantDifferentI BelieveModernPaintingPhotographyAimCompetitionI Believe InMediumsPainterApologyGraphicCopyrightModern Art
Book:Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition: His Photographs Accompanied by Excerpts from the Daybooks & Letters
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“Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?”

IfsWorldHumansMayMeanArtSelfFormFeltChallengesModernSubjectsPhotographyPhotographSupremeBranchesEnterprisePrincipalTourismEnlargementAbnormalityClandestineArt Photography
Author:Susan Sontag
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“Detachment, lack of sentimentality, originality, a lot of things that sound rather empty. I know what they mean. Let's say, "visual impact" may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though. I mean it's a quality that something has or does not have. Coherence. Well, some things are weak, some things are strong.”

KnowsWellsMayMeanDoeStrongSoundQualityPhotographyEmptyWeakImpactPhotographerVisualsOriginalityDetachmentSentimentalityCoherence
Author:Walker Evans
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“To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more acute eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world. Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times-the pulse of today. The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will, but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.”

IfsWorldShouldMayMeanPhilosophyRealityEyeTodayCoursesBehindsHonestSeriousExpressionPhotographyDirectPhotographerPhotographConnectedEvolveMeritRelatedConsiderationPulseSelective
Author:Berenice Abbott
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“Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.”

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Book:The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art
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“He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light.”

ThinkingMenWayMeanLightPastFormMemoriesCenturyPhotographyGhostPreservesStaringCaptureTime TravelFounders
Author:Carl Sagan
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“I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.”

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Author:Eudora Welty
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“I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of picture - by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don't even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that.”

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Author:Stan Brakhage
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“To know whether photography is or is not an art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography. By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is mean that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers: but on the contrary, recurring to all sorts of imitations.”

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Book:Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti
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“Nothing seemed to me more appropriate than to project an image of our time with absolute fidelity to nature by means of photography.”

MeanProjectsPhotographyAbsolutesOur TimeAppropriateFidelity
Book:August Sander: photographs of an epoch, 1904-1959 : man of the twentieth century, Rhineland landscapes, nature studies, architectural and industrial photographs, images of Sardinia : [exhibition]
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“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.”

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Author:A. D. Coleman
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“The Latin American photographer has the possibility, and the means, for naming the things of our world, for demonstrating that there is another kind of beauty, that the faces of the First World are not the only ones. These Indian, black, plundered white and mestizo faces are the first element defining the demographic content of our photography.”

WorldFirstsKindMeanFacesBlackWhitePossibilityElementsPhotographyPhotographerIndianLatinOur WorldDefiningLatin AmericaDemographicsDemonstratingLatin American
Author:Edmundo Desnoes
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“Photography is the typical means of expression of a society founded on a civilization of technicians, conscious of the aims it has set for itself... Its power of exactly reproducing external reality, a power inherent in its technique, lends it a documentary character and makes it appear as the most faithful and impartial process for the reproduction of social life.”

MeanCharacterRealitySocialProcessExpressionCivilizationPhotographyConsciousAimTechniqueFaithfulInherentTypicalDocumentariesSocial LifeReproductionTechniciansReproducing
Author:Gisele Freund
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“These days it seems that physical truth can easily be rearranged, rethought, or re-created outright. Any image can be made pristine, all the warts can be removed. But returning to the source of a thing - the real source - means the photographer has to watch, dig, listen for voices, sniff the smells, and have many doubts. My life in photography has been lived as a skeptic.”

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Author:Jerome Liebling
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“To do justice to modern technology's rigid linear structure, to the lofty gridwork of cranes and bridges, to the dynamism of machines operating at one thousand horsepower - only photography is capable of that. What those who are attached to the painterly style regard as photography's defect, the mechanical reproduction of form - is just what makes it superior to all other means of expression.”

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Author:Albert Renger-Patzsch
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“The question is not whether a picture is good, in some formal, technical sense, but, does it mean what I need it to mean? Writers can edit sentences that may be well-crafted but that don't express an intended thought. But in photography, there are no revisions: A photograph is in or it's out, and the photographer must live with the consequences of his or her choices.”

NeedsWellsMayMeanDoeChoicesPhotographyConsequencePhotographerPhotographSentencesFormalEditsRevision
Author:Thomas Roma
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“People thought this was a computer IT gig, and that will flow through those nerdy departments and it won't come into fashion photography, it won't come into television, it won't come into my daily communications, it won't come into my telephone, my microphone, my light control, my microwave radio, my - I mean, just name it.”

PeopleMeanLightNamesFashionTelevisionCommunicationComputerPhotographyFlowRadioDepartmentTelephonesGigsMicrophonesNerdyMicrowavesFashion Photography
Author:Juan Enriquez
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“Whatever pictures are put into the world, the balance needs to be readdressed, it needs to be observed. That's why I am also really questioning what a lot of photography has done since I began. I am not saying because of me, but I mean, photographing some friends partying and publishing the pictures meant something else in '92 than it does in 2011. And I find the younger generation is not questioning this at all today.”

WorldMeanDoneTodayPartyBalancePhotographyQuestioningPublishingYounger Generation
Author:Wolfgang Tillmans
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“I never had any intention nor interest in being an artist, but when I made work I realized that this was my language. What I had to say needed to be said in this way. I always loved taking photographs - but never considered myself a photographer. I have tremendous respect for photographers. I do use a camera and a photo as a basis for a lot of my work, but I use it as a means to attain an image to work from. The actual photography in my work is a monochromatic photograph. I'll photograph something and extract a color that will then be the background for a painting.”

MeanArtistLanguageInterestPaintingPhotographyIntentionPhotographerPhotographI RealizedBeing An Artist
Author:Paul Rusconi
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“Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.”

GivingMeanDoeSongCreativeApproachPhotographySubjectiveSubjectivityInitiate
Book:Berenice Abbott, photographer: a modern vision : a selection of photographs and essays
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