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Photography Quotes

Browse 3249 quotes about Photography.

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Photography Quotes

“Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs.”

IdeasTermPoorAttentionMistakePhotographyLet MePhotographProductionsExcuseExcellentImmatureExcellent Work
Book:Stieglitz on photography: his selected essays and notes
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“I do not want [photography] explained to me in terms of... formulas, learned, but so hopelessly unsatisfying. I do not want my butterfly stuck on a pin and put in a glass case. I want to see the sunlight on its wings as it flits from flower to flower and I don't care a rap what its Latin name may be.”

WantMayCareNamesTermCasesFlowerPhotographyWingsGlassesDon't CareRapStuckI Don't CareLatinFormulasButterflySunlightPins
Book:The Making of an American
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“3D is very exciting. I love it. I'm a complete convert. Everything for me, from now on, is 3D. I'm completely convinced it's the future of home entertainment, as well as cinema entertainment. I think it's a paradigm shift, in terms of cinema, and those things don't happen very often. The introduction of sound, the introduction of color photography and now 3D have been the big shifts. They happen once every 40 or 50 years, so it's very exciting to be a filmmaker, working while one of them is happening.”

ThinkingYearsWellsHas BeensHomeBigsHappensSoundTermColorPhotographyHappeningsExcitingEntertainmentConvincedCinemaFilmmakerIntroductionParadigmParadigm ShiftColor Photography
Author:Paul W. S. Anderson
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“I think there's a general confusion that my work is about types of photography. But really that's just a tool to introduce some questions I have about seeing. What happens when all of these conditions and structures and histories and cultures and tools you have around you begin to fail? On the one hand there is an engagement with histories and cultures, and on the other, there is this very lonesome space of actually coming to terms with seeing.”

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Author:Elad Lassry
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“For example, you now look at pictures from 1968, they are hugely misleading in terms of standing in as an absolute image of the time. Because maybe two percent of the people looked the way that we now associate with that time. I was also aware that what I was aiming for is an idealized, utopian version of how people could be together. I found photography to be a very powerful tool because as long as it looks real, it is perceived as real.”

PeopleLongRealTogetherTermPowerfulPhotographyVery PowerfulMisleadUtopian
Author:Wolfgang Tillmans
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“Press information is serious information, but press information is also manipulated by people who want you to think that this and that happened. So it's the old thing that you still cannot trust photography at all or you have to know who is distributing the photograph. In terms of cell phone photography, I think nobody cares about a photograph anymore because they're taking so many pictures just for fun.”

PeopleThinkingCareFunTermSeriousPhotographyPhotographCell PhoneNobody Cares
Author:Thomas Ruff
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“Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.”

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Book:Public Statements of Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 2001
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“Even though fixed in time, a photograph evokes as much feeling as that which comes from music or dance. Whatever the mode - from the snapshot to the decisive moment to multi-media montage - the intent and purpose of photography is to render in visual terms feelings and experiences that often elude the ability of words to describe. In any case, the eyes have it, and the imagination will always soar farther than was expected.”

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Author:Ralph Gibson
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“I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term - meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching - there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.”

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Author:Ansel Adams
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“Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.”

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Author:Berenice Abbott
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“Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.”

FirstsIdeasWholeTermTalkingTakenListeningSceneConversationProjectsPhotographyPhotographerPreparationInterviewsExcessDocumentsFormalExaminationCasualTalking And Listening
Book:Harlem photographs, 1932-1940
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“I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives. ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened.”

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Author:Jon Snow
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