Photograph Quotes - Page 37

• I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America. I wanted to photograph.

  Imogen Cunningham

  Photography, Artist, America

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• The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue.

  Lee Friedlander

  Wall, Mirrors, Cameras

  Lee Friedlander (1970). “Self Portrait”

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• My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues. But whenever I become absorbed in the beauty of a face, in the excellence of a single feature, I feel I've lost what's really there been seduced by someone else's standard of beauty or by the sitter's own idea of the best in him. That's not usually the best. So each sitting becomes a contest.

  Richard Avedon

  Reading, Ideas, Excellence

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• There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was an invention of hers. A genius invention that she created, like an author creates a character. She understood photography, and she also understood what makes a great photograph. She related to it as if she were giving a performance. She gave more to the still camera than any actress-any woman- I've ever photographed.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, Character, Giving

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• I think self-portraits are very difficult. I’ve always seen mine as straightforward, very stripped down, hair pulled back. No shirt. Whatever light happened to be available. I’d want it to be very graphic – about darkness and light. No one else should be there, but I’m scared to do it by myself. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. The whole idea of a self-portrait is strange. I’m so strongly linked to how I see through the camera that to get to the other side of it would be difficult. It would be as if I were taking a photograph in the dark.

  Annie Leibovitz

  Dark, Thinking, Light

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• It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.

  Minor White

  Want, Groups, Photographer

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• To engage a sequence, we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the one in our eye.

  Minor White

  Eye, Mind, Sides

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• While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.

  Minor White

  Play, Roles, Photographer

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• One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

  Minor White

  Photographer, Should

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• Theres no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

  Galen Rowell

  Artist, Talking, Needs

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• I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Brother, Taken, Color

  Harold Bloom, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (2009). “Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five”, p.47, Infobase Publishing

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• A quote that I like very much comes close to explaining my attitude about taking photographs. ‘Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms and with profound simplicity they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another; but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.’

  Stephen Shore

  Beautiful, Attitude, Artist

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• I don't know how many millions of photographs have been taken of me.

  Boris Becker

  Sports, Taken, Know How

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• I'm even taller in person, because photographs shrink you down and steal your soul native american.

  Thom Yorke

  Native American, Soul, Down And

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• I could learn photography. That could be something to want. I could photograph children. I could have my own children. I would give them yellow roses. And if they got too loud, I would just put them some place quiet. Put them in the oven. And I would kiss them every day, and tell them you don't have to be anybody, because I would know that being somebody doesn't make you anybody anyway.

  Gia Carangi

  Photography, Children, Kissing

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• Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

  Roland Barthes

  Certificates

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• Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph.

  Garry Winogrand

  Mistake, Emotion, Photographer

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• There is no special way a photograph should look.

  Garry Winogrand

  Photography, Special, Looks

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• I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.

  Garry Winogrand

  Beautiful, Knows, Ifs

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• In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it's something else.

  Garry Winogrand

  Photography, Would Be, Four

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• Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.

  Sally Mann

  Children, Memories, Thinking

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• The earth doesn’t care where death occurs. ...It’s the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death’s memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.

  Sally Mann

  Memories, Powerful, Writing

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• I can think of numberless males, from Bonnard to Callahan, who have photographed their lovers and spouses, but I am having trouble finding parallel examples among my sister photographers. The act of looking appraisingly at a man, making eye contact on the street, asking to photograph him, studying his body, has always been a brazen venture for a woman, though, for a man, these acts are commonplace, even expected.

  Sally Mann

  Eye, Men, Thinking

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• Literally, no man ever sees himself as others see him. No photograph or reflection ever gives us the same slant on ourselves that others see. It has often been proved on the witness stand that no two people ever see the same accident precisely the same way. We see through different eyes and from different angles. But if we could see things as other people see them, we could come closer to knowing why they do what they do and why they say what they say.

  Richard L. Evans

  Photography, Eye, Men

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• A man who loves his wife will love her letters and her photographs because they speak to him of her. So if we love the Lord Jesus, we shall love the Bible because it speaks to us of him.

  John Stott

  Christian, Jesus, Men

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