Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gus Van Sant

Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.

Graham Nash

I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years.

Jean Baudrillard

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

Jean Baudrillard

For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality...

Jean Baudrillard

It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.

Jean Baudrillard

So-called 'realist' photography does not capture the 'what is.' Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

Jaron Lanier

Here’s a current example of the challenge we face: At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?

Paul Auster

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Julia Margaret Cameron

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty to them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.

Paul Gauguin

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!

Paul Gauguin

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

Paul Gauguin

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?

Parker Stevenson

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture

Lillie Langtry

Why in the world would anyone want to photograph an old woman like me?

Patti Smith

My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

Patti Smith

Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who's spent their life devoted to photography.

Paul Emsley

Photography today is so accurate and so good that it's really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.

Marshall McLuhan

Nobody can commit photography alone.

Marshall McLuhan

[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.

Marshall McLuhan

Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.

Marshall McLuhan

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Joe McNally

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

Joe McNally

If you view your life as a piece of fabric or a tapestry, the photography is the stitching. It keeps everything together.

Joe McNally

A career in photography is a journey without a destination.

Joe McNally

You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

Joe McNally

We make pictures. At the end of the day, we create something potentially significant that did not exist at the beginning of the day. We go forward, despite the uncertainty. Because this is an act of love and passion, which defies reason and prudence.

Joe McNally

Always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It's the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

Joe McNally

No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It's the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

Joe McNally

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

Imogen Cunningham

...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

Imogen Cunningham

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

Imogen Cunningham

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.