Photograph Quotes - Page 23

• I have always tried to keep truth in my photographs. My work, whether realistic or abstract, has always dealt with a form of religion or imagination.

  Ralph Eugene Meatyard

  Imagination, Realistic, Abstract

  James Rhem, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (2002). “Ralph Eugene Meatyard : the family album of Lucybelle Crater and other figurative photographs”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• The collection of photographs is a statement about the relationship of my camera and me.

  Ray Metzker

  Cameras, Collections, Statements

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• We feel more emotion... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.

  Chris Marker

  Art, Levels, Personal History

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• It seems to me that no one picture can ever be a final summation of a personality. There are so many facets in every human being that it is impossible to present them all in one photograph.

  Arnold Newman

  Personality, Finals, Impossible

  Arnold Newman (1974). “One Mind's Eye: The Portraits and Other Photographs of Arnold Newman”, David R Godine Pub

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• ... anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.

  Michael Light

  Cameras, Gravestone, Impression

  "100 Suns and the Nuclear Sublime". Interview with Robert Hirsch, lightresearch.net. July / August 2005.

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• I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera, a military photographer, or Mike Light really doesn't matter. What matters is the context of the final photograph and the meaning it generates within that context.

  Michael Light

  Military, What Matters, Light

  "100 Suns and the Nuclear Sublime". Interview with Robert Hirsch, lightresearch.net. July / August 2005.

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• My pictures are not really about the children that I photograph. They're more like actors in a film. I think you can always recognize the children, but they are alienated from their real appearance and become more like metaphors.

  Loretta Lux

  Children, Real, Thinking

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• The familiar photographs that many people carry with them always obviously belong to the order of fetishes in the ordinary sense of the word.

  Christian Metz

  Order, People, Ordinary

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• During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable.

  Lev Manovich

  Photography, Reality, Drawing

  Lev Manovich (2001). “The Language of New Media”, p.168, MIT Press

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• ... if [a photograph is] unbelievably real it becomes superreal or another kind of super real, better than real... [it] also can be, I think, so heartfelt that you almost can get a pang of compassion for the thing.

  Ralph Eugene Meatyard

  Real, Thinking, Compassion

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• Before, the myth of photography doesn't lie was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could.

  Pedro Meyer

  Photography, Lying, Reality

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• Photographs should celebrate the contingent, the spontaneous, the incomplete, the fortuitous. Direct, unblinking vision should be coupled with deliberate indifference as to subject. The ironic goal is a scrupulous recording of whatever chance brings to hand.

  Douglas McCulloh

  Hands, Goal, Ironic

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• I wasn't very ambitious. I think that's the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn't say I didn't have any problem, but I didn't care. I didn't think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.

  Imogen Cunningham

  Photography, Thinking, People

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• [My work] includes something about death, and about love, because the photos always have something to do with death. The photograph is like taxidermy. It is like the animals I use. They are posed in order to appear to be alive, but they are dead. Their time has passed. The photos have to do with time and loss, and conclusion.

  Annette Messager

  Loss, Animal, Love Is

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• I never wanted to make portraits - to photograph celebrities, beautiful people, beautiful landscapes, beautiful buildings, or people in distressing situations.... I have always been interested in everyman - average, ordinary people in everyday situations.

  Ray Metzker

  Beautiful, Average, People

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• Never pose your subjects. Let them move about naturally... All great photographs today are snapshots.

  Martin Munkacsi

  Moving, Snapshots, Today

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• Merging photographs can be more real than the isolated image because reality is so much more rich than just an isolated moment.

  Pedro Meyer

  Real, Moments, Rich

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• Photographs are but one link in a potentially endless chain of reduplication; themselves duplicates (of both their objects and, in a sense, their negatives), they are also subject to further duplication, either through the procedures of printing or as objects of still other photographs.

  Craig Owens

  Links, Printing, Chains

  Craig Owens, Scott Stewart Bryson (1994). “Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture”, p.26, Univ of California Press

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• It's important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation - to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.

  Abelardo Morell

  Important, Different, Transformation

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• A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don't care where it's going to go.

  Abelardo Morell

  Interesting, Care, I Don't Care

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 2, 2003.

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• I started making photographs as if I were a child myself. This got me to look at things more closely, more slowly, and from vantage points I hadn't considered before.

  Abelardo Morell

  Children, Looks, Vantage Point

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• Making a definitive declaration of intent or meaning kills the photograph.

  Daido Moriyama

  Declaration

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• I realized eventually that if I was really on top of what I was doing, I should be able to make photographs out of almost anything.

  Grant Mudford

  Able, Should, I Realized

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• One of the magical things about photography is the transformation that takes place when you photograph something. Something that inherently has very little going for it in terms of the interest you take in it, can become infinitely more interesting when rendered as a photograph. It's no longer a building. It's a photograph.

  Grant Mudford

  Photography, Interesting, Going For It

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• Perhaps the first photograph ever taken, Niépce's view of the rooftops over Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, was a truly pure photograph. The second one he took, he was already comparing nature to the first photograph he had taken.

  Vik Muniz

  Taken, Views, Saint

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