Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dorothea Lange

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

Dorothea Lange

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

Dorothea Lange

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

Dorothea Lange

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you.

Dorothea Lange

The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

Dorothea Lange

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon... We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.

Dorothea Lange

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

Dorothea Lange

To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

Dorothea Lange

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.

Criss Angel

If people are fans of 'Mindfreak,' they are going to be so excited with 'Believe.' They are actually going to see those illusions that people think can only happen with trick photography.

Claude Levi-Strauss

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.

Daniel Clowes

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

The advent of the digital age and the immediacy and convenience of digital video and photography allows people to become an integral part of the feedback loop which actively shapes the content we are fed.

Damien Hirst

But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they're taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it's a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it's unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.

E. B. White

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

Andy Warhol

My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.

Andy Warhol

Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

Andre Breton

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

Ann Beattie

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.

Andres Serrano

My use of the medium - photography - is in some ways traditional.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

Chuck Close

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

Chuck Close

It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.

Chuck Close

In life you can be dealt a winning hand of cards and you can find a way to lose, and you can be dealt a losing hand and find a way to win. True in art and true in life: you pretty much make your own destiny. If you are by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a better position to be lucky in life.

Chuck Close

If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else's art.

Chuck Close

There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.

Chuck Close

I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won't be able to give much information about who it is.

Chuck Close

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

Chuck Close

There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it's just phenomenal. There's also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation between left-handedness and learning disabilities.

Chuck Close

I'm very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.