PHOTOGRAPHY QUOTES II
quotations about photography
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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
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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
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
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 has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.... The world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other medium.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
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
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
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
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
We think of photography as the intersection of science and art.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land
Photography is a fickle art. You might start with the plan to shoot perfume bottles and end up doing corporate portraits. You might think at some point in your career that uber retouched imagery is your signature only to realize that the natural look that you though so boring is becoming a key ingredient in your style. Yes there are individuals who have a distinct style even when they are toddlers but for the rest of us -- human beings -- our art is forged by the gruesome practice of trail and fail.
ANNA DABROWSKA
"Why Professional Gear Is Not The Most Important Element in Photography", Fstoppers, April 20, 2016
The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information.
VILEM FLUSSER
Towards a Philosophy of Photography
Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.
MASON COOLEY
City Aphorisms
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
JOHN BERGER
About Looking
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGE
Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life
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 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
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