Famous Quotes & Sayings

Imogen Cunningham

I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

Imogen Cunningham

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

Imogen Cunningham

I wasn't very ambitious. I think that's the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn't say I didn't have any problem, but I didn't care. I didn't think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.

Ilka Chase

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.

Ilka Chase

Very few people, thank God, look like the pictures of them which are published in the papers and the weekly magazines ...

Kim Edwards

Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.

Ken Burns

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

Kazimir Malevich

I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927)

Margaret Atwood

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

Marcel Duchamp

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

Jean-Francois Lyotard

One knows that frontal and/or profile photography is torn to pieces... Inversely, what remains of the photograph must be seen as a fragment coming to fill a gap in the drawing.

Gia Coppola

I guess I knew my dad was into photography, so a part of me was interested in picking it up to understand him a little better.

Pablo Picasso

Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?

Pablo Picasso

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

Pablo Picasso

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

Pablo Picasso

When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objectives of painting. Why should an artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera?

Pablo Picasso

In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.

Pablo Picasso

Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.

Pablo Picasso

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Paul Cezanne

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

Oscar Wilde

The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.

Madonna Ciccone

When we take a picture, we have a negative. We put the right solution on it and, suddenly, the picture comes to life. So what do we do? We take the negative and turn it into a positive.

Madonna Ciccone

I love being photographed, or I should say I love the art of photography. It's about people taking photographs of you, stealing them, and then presuming or assuming or captioning. Words can never be taken back, photographs can never be taken back, nothing can ever be taken back.

Lorrie Moore

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

Michael Deaver

I think it's very dangerous for a free society to have all the information distilled and packaged by our government and given to us. Do we know to this day who we killed in Iraq? I don't think so. If bringing war into the living room means that we as a people will say we don't want to do it that way anymore we want to figure out other ways to solve these conflicts, then I would say that photography and television have done us a great service.

Jason Sudeikis

Now Ben Folds is my photography older brother. He was kind enough to give me a photo of his for my 40th birthday.

Jason Sudeikis

One of my oldest friends from Kansas, his sister was married to Ben [Folds] and wrote lyrics on his first couple of albums. I got to meet him the first time I saw them in concert at The Bottleneck, a great bar in Lawrence, Kansas. Then, he was the musical guest my first or second week as a writer on SNL. I was like, "I don't know if you remember me?" And he was like, "Oh my god, yeah!" He's a big photography fan, as am I.

Eugene Delacroix

Let a man of genius make use [of photography] as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.

Eugene Delacroix

[Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.

Ernst Haas

A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.

Ernst Haas

Is photography art?... The pure definition of the word 'art' alone is too vague today to break one's brain and soul about it. Let us take a little vacation from this word.

Ernst Haas

in the smallest cells are reflections of the largest. And in photography, through an interplay of scales, a whole universe within a universe can be revealed.