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Photography Quotes

Browse 3249 quotes about Photography.

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Photography Quotes

“Some objects and events may be photographed, others, if one is to render their true quality, should be painted or set to music, since their essence is more faithfully reproduced through imagination than by the journalistic report.”

IfsShouldMayImaginationQualityEventsObjectsPhotographyEssenceReportsJournalistic
Book:New York 22: that district of the City which lies between Fiftieth and Sixtieth Streets, Fifth Avenue, and the East River
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“Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.”

WellsDoeEndsSelfInterestCenturyObjectsPhotographyPhotographDenyErasInevitablePhenomenonPortraits20th CenturySelf PortraitSelf Portrait Photography
Author:Yasumasa Morimura
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“All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.”

FilmArtistSoundInterestPerfectObjectsPersonalityPhotographyScreensInterpretationCopiesMakersMediocrityBoresDiscouragingReproductionRefinement
Author:Jean Renoir
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“[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.”

WayKindCertainObjectsMinesPhotographyRelationPhotographDelightFeaturesCollectionsBiographiesPreferenceSuppliesAmorous
Author:Roland Barthes
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“[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.”

PeopleWorldHumansHas BeensAgeLyingTurnsNamesObjectsPhotographyMassCamerasPhotographProportionDeceitMuseumsMultipleMerchandise
Author:Marshall McLuhan
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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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“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.”

MatterUseUsedSuccessfulObjectsStrangeBabyPhotographyShadowDramaticFlashPortraitsLightingInanimate Objects
Author:Julius Shulman
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“We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.”

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Author:Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.”

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Author:Paul Strand
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“The camera is not only an extension of the eye but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye - visible.”

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Author:Wynn Bullock
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“"You know you are seeing such a photograph if you say to yourself, "I could have taken that picture. I've seen such a scene before, but never like that." It is the kind of photography that relies for its strengths not on special equipment or effects but on the intensity of the photographer's seeing. It is the kind of photography in which the raw materials-light, space, and shape-are arranged in a meaningful and even universal way that gives grace to ordinary objects."”

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Author:Sam Abell
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“While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.”

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Author:Susan Sontag
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“The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”

TwoDesireEvilVisionClassObjectsPhotographyPhotographInvisibleLandscapePerceiveGood And EvilGrantsWhy NotDestroyingDualityWindowpane
Author:Roland Barthes
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“Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.”

IfsHumansHas BeensChoicesGivenDecisionResultsSituationEventsObjectsParticularBearsPhotographyPhotographerPhotographWitnessMeaningless
Book:Selected Essays of John Berger
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“As I became aware that all things have unique spatial and temporal qualities which visually define and relate them, I began to perceive the things I was photographing not as objects but as events. Working to develop my skills of perceiving and symbolizing these event qualities, I discovered the principle of opposites. When, for example, I photographed the smooth, luminous body of a woman behind a dirty cobwebbed window, I found that the qualities of each event were enhanced and the universal forces which they manifested were more powerfully evoked.”

BodyFoundForceBehindsQualityPrinciplesEventsExampleObjectsSkillsPhotographyUniqueAll ThingsWindowOppositesUniversalPhotographerRelateDirtyPerceiveSmoothLuminousSpatial
Book:Wynn Bullock, photographing the nude: the beginnings of a quest for meaning
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