Photograph Quotes - Page 34

• Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Photography, Liars, Lying

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• I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.

  Francesco Clemente

  Giving, Portraits, Portraiture

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• Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

  Susan Sontag

  Two, Long, Shadow

  Susan Sontag (2014). “On Photography”, p.105, Penguin UK

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• The Place of Religion in Chicago is a clearly written account of a little-studied aspect of American landscape. Based on unique field surveys and supported by photographs, tables, and beautifully crafted maps, the book will form a lasting contribution to our understanding of an overlooked element of the American urban scene: the religious landscape of a major metropolis.

  Peter Haggett

  Religious, Book, Unique

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• My goal is to make all my paintings clear and realistic, even more understandable than a photograph.

  E. J. Hughes

  Goal, Understanding, Painting

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• I tend to always carry a camera with me. I live next to a fire station, and I've got lots of photos of the hook and ladder coming out of the house. And I like food, so I tend to photograph wonderfully presented food all the time. To me those are very pleasant memories.

  Gordon Bell

  Memories, Fire, House

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• In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people?

  Burton Silverman

  Taken, Museums, People

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• Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate. Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies. Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality... Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

  Martin Parr

  Photography, Fashion, Lying

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• Fiction is an expressionist painting rather than a photograph.

  Josip Novakovich

  Fiction, Painting

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• There is nothing, under present conditions, that can be more easily and exactly reproduced than a technically good black-and-white photograph, and it is utter rot to burden those interested in them with irrelevant biographical trivia and pet longwinded theory.

  Clarence John Laughlin

  Black And White, Pet, Trivia

  Clarence John Laughlin, Lafcadio Hearn, Philadelphia Museum of Art (1973). “Clarence John Laughlin: the personal eye”

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• All seeing, I think, is painful. Every photograph is a little sting, a hurt inflicted in its subject, but even more: every glance hurts in some way, freezing and condensing what's seen into something that it is not.

  James Elkins

  Hurt, Thinking, Littles

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• There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.

  Arthur Ashe

  Powerful, Boys, Virginia

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• Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Atrocities, Abu Ghraib, Shocked

  "EDITORIAL: Hunter S. Thompson went too far" by Ashley ODell, www.imediaethics.org. May 25, 2004.

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• Identical twins. I'm glad they're identical 'cause you save money on photographs. That's what I like. Yeah. Here's my little boy. I got another one just like it.

  Ray Romano

  Boys, Littles, Causes

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• When I first started learning how to take photographs, you had to spend the first six months figuring out what an f-stop was. Now you just go and take pictures.

  Martin Parr

  Preparation, Six Months, Firsts

  "An Interview with Martin Parr – “Boundaries Merely Exist in People's Minds” (2007)". Interview with Maarten Dings, Joachim Naudts, www.americansuburbx.com. May 17, 2010.

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• I am what I photograph.

  Martin Parr

  Ego

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• Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Believe, People, Film

  Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger (2009). “Seven Nights”, p.13, New Directions Publishing

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• Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

  John Fowles

  War, Numbers, People

  "The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas". Book by John Fowles, 1964.

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• A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography

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• To collect photographs is to collect the world.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, World

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.5, Macmillan

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• Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Ugliness

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.76, Macmillan

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• Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

  Duane Michals

  Description, Insight

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• Sometimes I work on film sets. I've done this for 40 years. I always wanted to photograph on the set of an Ingmar Bergman film. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity.

  Mary Ellen Mark

  Opportunity, Years, Done

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• There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it's better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don't know very well.

  Mary Ellen Mark

  Distance, Thinking, People

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• But my motivation was more a matter of wanting to create order - to keep track of things. All those boxes full of photographs and sketches weigh you down, because they have something unfinished, incomplete, about them. So it's better to present the usable material in an orderly fashion and throw the other stuff away. That's how the Atlas came to be, and I exhibited it a few times.

  Gerhard Richter

  Fashion, Art, Motivation

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Oct 29, 2013

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