Documentaries Quotes - Page 22

• I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.

  W. Eugene Smith

  Photography, Thinking, Purpose

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• Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Interesting, Fiction, Ifs

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• When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Art, Real

  Jeff Rosenheim, Walker Evans, Jane Ninas, Historic New Orleans Collection (1991). “Walker Evans and Jane Ninas in New Orleans, 1935-1936”, Historic New Orleans

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• [Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)

  Pierre Mac Orlan

  Photography, Artist, Moments

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• I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.

  Joan Fontcuberta

  Photography, Needs, Use

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• Photography is the typical means of expression of a society founded on a civilization of technicians, conscious of the aims it has set for itself... Its power of exactly reproducing external reality, a power inherent in its technique, lends it a documentary character and makes it appear as the most faithful and impartial process for the reproduction of social life.

  Gisele Freund

  Photography, Character, Mean

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• The documentary style is an incredibly flexible and useful one. It's a wonderful tool for establishing the credibility of the version of things that's in the photograph - a kind of rhetorical device or rhetorical strategy. It's always felt very natural to me, because I want a person to end up thinking about the world, and to think about it in a way that is transformed by the experience of art.

  Frank Gohlke

  Art, Thinking, Rhetorical Strategies

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• For years my only purpose was to do documentary photos for magazines, without any idea that they were part of a larger project. It was as if I were carried along by a stream - even though I believed that the current was taking me in the right direction.

  Hiroshi Hamaya

  Years, Ideas, Purpose

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• In a way my work is documentary. But I am also a photographer who has a distinct style. My photographs are a companion to the reality of the situation.

  Graciela Iturbide

  Reality, Style, Way

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• A picture that is ghostly and silent can be more eloquent and less clichéd than a noisier photo-journalistic approach and I have attempted to make pictures that whilst they are not documentary in the traditional sense, they are still documents, like forensic traces.

  Simon Norfolk

  Silent, Forensics, Approach

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• I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.

  Catherine Opie

  Photographer, Kind, Twisted

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• The exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting - and careerism.

  Martha Rosler

  Compassion, Dedication, Hunting

  Martha Rosler (2004). “Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001”, p.178, MIT Press

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• Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.)

  Martha Rosler

  Leaving, Littles, Faces

  Martha Rosler (2004). “Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001”, p.179, MIT Press

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• Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.

  Allan Sekula

  Photography, Envy, Understanding

  Allan Sekula, Illinois State University. University Galleries (1999). “Dismal science: photo works, 1972-1996”, Illinois State Univ

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• ...I don't see myself as a documentary photographer. I am more drawn to the image itself, rather than to the description of a scene. And, anyway, every image only halfway represents reality, whereas the other half is rather, more or less, fulfilling our imagination.

  Beat Streuli

  Reality, Imagination, Half

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• My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.

  Wolfgang Tillmans

  Real, People, Looks

  Interview with Peter Halley and Bob Nickas, www.indexmagazine.com. 1997.

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• The photographic frame is no longer used as a documentary window into undisturbed private lives, but as a stage on which the subjects consciously direct themselves to bring forward hidden information that is not normally displayed on the surface.

  Arthur Tress

  Information, Window, Stage

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• Making the documentary was an extraordinary experience and it really hit home to me the quasi-religious nature of this anthropogenic global warming cause. These people really have found religion.

  Nick Minchin

  Religious, Home, People

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• I think being really open to this new world of online and what it means to be online. Also, understanding that maybe it's time to let go of the 90-minute experience and realize that all of the content that comes on top of the 90-minute film experience, [that] there's a lot of that, especially with documentaries.

  Alex Stapleton

  Letting Go, Mean, Thinking

  Source: collider.com

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• I've always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality - which is not really... I don't even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation.

  Gus Van Sant

  Jobs, Reality, Trying

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• No one likes documentaries.

  Alex Gibney

  Likes

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I personally chose to go vegan because I educated myself on factory farming and cruelty to animals, and I suddenly realized that what was on my plate were living things, with feelings. And I just couldn't disconnect myself from it any longer. I read books like 'Diet for a New America' and saw documentaries like 'Earthlings' and 'Meet your Meat,' and it became an easy choice for me.

  Ellen DeGeneres

  Book, Animal, America

  "Why Ellen Went Vegan". www.peta.org. November 09, 2009.

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• I think everything can be painted because painting can change reality; but everything cannot be photographed and the photographer often comes home empty-handed, with images which (often) have a documentary interest, but which rarely go further than that. One has to be completely available, very tenacious and admit that many subjects won't give any results... and a miracle sometimes happens, without warning.

  Martine Franck

  Home, Reality, Thinking

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• Most people see a documentary about the meat industry and then they become a vegetarian for a week.

  Jason Reitman

  Meat Industry, People, Vegetarian

  "Jason Reitman grows up with young adult". Interview with Angela Watercutter, December 15, 2011.

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• I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting!

  Stewart Francis

  Together, Ships, Saws

  "Edinburgh fringe's 10 funniest jokes revealed" by Mark Brown, www.theguardian.com. August 21, 2012.

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