quotations about photography
Photography bears witness to the passage of time, but it cannot make statements as to the importance of things at any time, nor is it concerned with "truth and beauty" or with teasing out what underlies appearance. Rather, it voraciously records anything in view.
LIZ WELLS
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Photography: A Critical Introduction
Composition in photography is almost as varied as composition in music or words -- melodic or atonal, safe or daring -- and can enhance subject, theme, and style. Every photograph you take involves you in some compositional decision, even if this is simply where to set up the camera or when to press the button.
MICHAEL LANGFORD
Basic Photography
A photograph is a biography of a moment.
ART SHAY
interview, CBS News, February 13, 2014
The definition of a picture and the definition of photography is evolving in this truly digital space. Pictures can do things that pictures were never supposed to do.
RUSSELL ARMAND
"How the GIF Is Taking Over the World", Time, March 30, 2016
The definition of photography is changing, too, and becoming more of a language. We're attaching imagery to tweets or text messages, almost like a period at the end of a sentence. It's enhancing our communication in a whole new way.
JOSHUA ALLEN HARRIS
"In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing", The New Yorker, April 4, 2016
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
Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life
Photography is a powerful medium of persuasion and propaganda. It has that ring of truth when all the time, in artful hands, it can make any statement the manipulator chooses.
MICHAEL LANGFORD
Basic Photography
After all, the decisive quality in a photographer is the faculty of seeing certain things and being tempted by them.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
"George Bernard Shaw on Coburn's Photography", British Journal of Photography, 1906
Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.
MASON COOLEY
City Aphorisms
You put your camera around your neck in the morning, along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.
DOROTHEA LANGE
Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
MARC RIBOUD
FotoFest 90: The International Month of Photography: February 10-March 10
The camera is a perfect companion. It makes no demands, imposes no obligations. It becomes your notebook and your reference library, your microscope and your telescope. It sees what you are too lazy or too careless to notice, and it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
AARON SISKIND
attributed, The Amateur Photographer's Handbook
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
RICHARD AVEDON
attributed, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
ROLAND BARTHES
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
KARL LAGERFELD
attributed, Click You!
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGE
Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life
The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous.
WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD
attributed, Fine Art Photography: Water, Ice, and Fog
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
ANSEL ADAMS
attributed, Light and Lens: Photography in the Digital Age
Photography, if practiced with high seriousness, is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.
JOHN SZARKOWSKI
Looking at photographs: 100 pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.
SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography