Famous Quotes & Sayings

Susan Sontag

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Susan Sontag

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Susan Sontag

To photograph is to confer importance.

Susan Sontag

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Susan Sontag

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Susan Sontag

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

Umberto Eco

If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.

Rick Steves

I shutter to think how many people are underexposed and lacking depth in this field.

Vik Muniz

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.

Vik Muniz

I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.

Subcomandante Marcos

For me it is clear that photography prizes should be for those being photographed and not for the photographers.

Steve Coleman

Laugh, love, dream, strive, smile, feel, joy, look, try, fail, read, walk, search, share, help, work, fun, learn, retry, sweat, cry, rest, wait, fear, hope, trust, pride... when we have lived all of these, our photography might stop being a record of what our camera sees and become an expression of what we as photographers feel.

Stephen Sprouse

Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.

Stephen Sprouse

The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.

Stephen Sprouse

I just really wanted to do art, except when I was taking those photographs of people I would make the clothes that I would photograph them in so I could control the whole thing.

Ruth Bernhard

Light is my inspiration. My photographic images search for dimensions that words cannot touch- the result of intense responses to personal experiences. I do not wish to "record," but rather to touch upon the illusive meanings which I perceive and try to comprehend in this limitless universe.

Ruth Bernhard

Photography is art when it's used by an artist.

Ruth Bernhard

Never ever say the word shoot when you are taking a picture with a camera because a camera is not a violent weapon.

Ruth Bernhard

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

Ruth Bernhard

I expect photographs to find me. I never thought of looking for them. I instinctively put them there. My intellect had nothing to do with it.

Ruth Bernhard

You have to follow your instinct all the time. Otherwise you don't make it.

Ruth Bernhard

Every day I am aware of the flow and constant change; perhaps I am at the edge of discovering what more our bodies might be able to teach about the spirit of life. At least, I am always exploring and trying to understand our relationship to the whole universe.

Ruth Bernhard

For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe.

Ruth Bernhard

If you can't make the image bigger or more important than what you see, then don't push the button

Ruth Bernhard

Woman has been the target of much that is sordid and cheap, especially in photography. To raise, to elevate, to endorse with timeless reverence the image of woman, has been my mission.

Ruth Bernhard

Light is my inspiration, my paint and brush. It is as vital as the model herself. Profoundly significant, it caresses the essential superlative curves and lines. Light I acknowledge as the energy upon which all life on this planet depends.

Ruth Bernhard

There is no such thing as taking too much time, because your soul is in that picture.

Ruth Bernhard

A person cannot learn to be a photographer. He can only cultivate what he already has. I try to make people aware that they have something very precious to cultivate.

Ruth Bernhard

If youre not interested in life, then photography has no meaning

Ruth Bernhard

Fall in love. Every day. With everything. With life. If you can fall in love, you can be a photographer. I think that is absolutely essential.

Ruth Bernhard

If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won't make you cry.

Rudolf Arnheim

The ambition of instantaneous photography... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.

W. H. Auden

It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject.