Quotes about photography
photography honesty expression
The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods. Paul Strand
photography thinking self
Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.
photography moving goal
Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.
photography expression vision
Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)
photography law kitchen
I don't care how you photograph - use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography... you have produced something that is dead. (1923)
photography wall real
Every artist I suppose has a sense of what they think has been the importance of their work. But to ask them to define it is not really a fair question. My real answer would be, the answer is on the wall.
photography use research
I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.
photography essence objectivity
Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation
photography rain taken
Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly...does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.
photography law two
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.
photography people profound
Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, 'I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.' He knew how insidious other people's ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.
photography important world
The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.
photography humanness-is people
It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.
photography records photographer
Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.
photography records made
Moreover, photography has made it possible to fix these images and now provides us with a permanent record of each observed spectrum, which can be measured out at any time. Pieter Zeeman
photography groups produce
Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration. Pierre Bourdieu
photography reality objectivity
In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.
photography art reality
No photographer should be blamed when, instead of capturing reality, he tries to show things he has seen only in his imagination. Photography is the youngest art form. All attempts to enlarge its frontiers are important and should be encouraged. Philippe Halsman
photography firsts prostitution
I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for the money.
photography heart eye
On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.
photography black-and-white nostalgia
To some extent, the cult surrounding black-and-white photography is based on nostalgia.
photography technology avid
As an avid photographer, I also took advantage of the latest technology in photography - digital photography - to post photos on my website on a daily basis. Tipper Gore
photography art records
Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole. Robert Adams
photography silence compelling
Among the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs is their implication of silence.
photography space littles
Little wonder that we. . .find the old pictures of openness - pictures usually without any blur, and made by what seems a ritual of patience - wonderful. They restore to us knowledge of a place we seek but lose in the rush of our search. Though to enjoy even the pictures, much less the space itself, requires that we be still longer than is our custom.
photography firsts photographer
Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.
photography art discovery
. . .art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion.
photography running mistake
Nature photography... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves.
photography invention instance
Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.
photography faithful records
...I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then... find wholeness in the torn world.
photography thinking artist
Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'
photography reality views
... If we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his camera by mule, and the person stepping for a moment from his car to take a picture with his Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality.
photography thinking landscape
We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.