Home / Topics / Photography Quotes

Photography Quotes

Browse 3249 quotes about Photography.

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.”

People Ifs Knows World Want Looks Mean Enough Use Care Common Vision Know How Alive Achieve Photography Photograph Worthless If You Care Pictorial

Author:Paul Strand

“I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers.”

Way Has Beens Art Today Century Color Photography Research Strategy Photographer Landscape Viewers Nineteenth Century Pictorial American Landscape

Author:John Pfahl

“Photography, of course, is the perfect medium for the investigation. It can reveal the truth of present day specifics and particularities, while at the same time, by conscious choice of lighting and pictorial structure, suggest the aesthetic legacy of the past.”

Past Choices Courses Perfect Photography Conscious Structure Photographer Mediums Legacy Aesthetic Investigation Lighting Present Day Pictorial Specifics

Author:John Pfahl

“The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.”

“The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.”

Ifs Art Stories Photography Art Is Historical Photograph Triumph Monument Pictorial Literary Art

Author:Clement Greenberg

“The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.”

Art Problem Eye Film Cases Special Painting Pride Photography Bases Cameras Video Mediums Dominant Extensions Nineteen Verdict Withered Pictorial Exemption

Author:Peter Schjeldahl

“[Dada is] perfectly kindhearted malice, alongside exact photography the only legitimate pictorial form of communication and balance in shared experience.”

Form Communication Balance Photography Malice Pictorial Shared Experiences

Author:Raoul Hausmann

“In fact, the new malleability of the image may eventually lead to a profound undermining of photography's status as an inherently truthful pictorial form... If even a minimal confidence in photography does not survive, it is questionable whether many pictures will have meaning anymore, not only as symbols but as evidence.”

Ifs May Doe Facts Form Photography Evidence Profound Symbols Truthful Questionable Undermining Pictorial

Author:Fred Ritchin

“No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.”

Done Literature Disease Photography Representation Pictorial

Book:Complete Works of John Ruskin

Source: Complete Works of John Ruskin

“When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial cliches.”

Matter Vision Subjects Fit Photography Photographer Patterns Following Composition Repetition Cliche Subject Matter Tedious Freshness Pictorial Following Rules

Book:Edward Weston on photography

Source: Edward Weston on photography

“It seems so utterly naive that landscape - not that of the pictorial school - is not considered of "social significance" when it has a far more important bearing on the human race of a given locale than excrescences called cities.”

Humans Important Seems School Given Social Race Cities Photography Landscape Human Race Significance Naive Pictorial

Book:The letters between Edward Weston and Willard Van Dyke

Source: The letters between Edward Weston and Willard Van Dyke

“The photograph is not only a pictorial report; it is also a psychological report. It represents the feelings and point of view of the intelligence behind the camera.”

Feelings Views Behinds Photography Cameras Photograph Point Of View Psychological Reports Pictorial

Author:Alexey Brodovitch