Photograph Quotes - Page 39

• If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.

  Allan Nevins

  Art, Past, Ideas

  Allan Nevins (1975). “Allan Nevins on history”

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• I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

  Duane Michals

  Photography, Writing, Bird

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• The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.

  Neil Postman

  Photography, Taken, Way

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.73, Penguin

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• The photograph is married to the eye,
  Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth.

  Dylan Thomas

  Truth, Eye, Skins

  Dylan Thomas, Daniel Jones (2003). “The Poems of Dylan Thomas”, p.105, New Directions Publishing

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• I was thinking of the word Surrealistic . . . I don't think it should be used exclusively with my photographs. The meaning is close but I think my tendencies are more toward the whimsical or absurd. Surrealism is more connected with morbidity. From that I am very far away.

  Eva Fuka

  Thinking, Far Away, Whimsical

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• Sex is not a subject in my photographs, or would only be if it had to do with romance, sometimes vulnerability. The photographs are quite clearly about happiness, or search for happiness.

  Hedi Slimane

  Sex, Romance, Sometimes

  "Hedi Slimane Interview: 'California Song' at MOCA Los Angeles". Interview with Isabel Wilkinson, www.thedailybeast.com. January 20, 2012.

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• The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave, I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, 'Damn it', I took my camera and went out into the street.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Running, Believe

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• Nothing speaks louder than an evocative photograph that stirs the imagination, tugs at the heart strings and engages the mind.

  Mark Carwardine

  Heart, Imagination, Mind

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• In assembling this group of portraits of women, I'm aware that I'm treading on dangerous ground. When I was in college, I learned to be distrustful of men's depictions of women. I remember seeing Garry Winogrand's book Women Are Beautiful in the school library and being shocked that it hadn't been defaced for its blatant objectification of women. But looking back, maybe I was too harsh. Whether one photographs men or women, it is always a form of objectification. Whatever you say about Winogrand, his depiction was honest.

  Alec Soth

  Beautiful, Book, School

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• The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Winter, Secret

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• The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
  of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

  Roland Barthes

  Simple, Unity, Accessories

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• One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.

  Roland Barthes

  Ethical Questions, Our World, Desire

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• A photograph must come from imagination and not be a reflection of what is.

  Thierry Mugler

  Reflection, Imagination

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• When I saw photographs of children murdered by the Fascist, I felt furious pity. When the supporters of Franco talked of Red atrocities, I merely felt indignant that people should tell such lies. In the first case I saw corpses, in the second only words. . . I gradually acquired a certain horror of the way in which my own mind worked. It was clear to me that unless I cared about every murdered child impartially, I did not really care about children being murdered at all.

  Stephen Spender

  Children, Lying, People

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• I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars.

  Helmut Newton

  Girl, Years, Lasts

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• Take pictures all the time. Don't worry if you take a bad photograph; you learn more by taking a bad picture than a good one. If you don't like it, study it and figure out why you don't like it. You'll learn from your mistake.

  Patrick Demarchelier

  Mistake, Worry, Study

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• It became the middle finger I couldn’t raise in PR photographs. The mustache became my silent last word in the verbal battles I was losing with higher headquarters on rules, targets, and fighting the war.

  Robin Olds

  War, Fighting, Mustache

  Christina Olds, Ed Rasimus, Robin Olds (2010). “Fighter Pilot: The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds”, p.284, Macmillan

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• I have been a photographer all my life....and have made photographs of many things and for many reasons. But one thing that becomes more and more apparent is that I am simply only as good as my next photograph. That's the one that counts the most....For this reason I find it a delight to face a new day, and to develop that new roll of film. It's a great way to live.

  Ralph Gibson

  New Day, Way To Live, Delight

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• Taking photographs and writing is my way of saying I was here, I saw this, I felt this, I heard this.

  Duane Michals

  Writing, Way, Saws

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• When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth.

  Hiroshi Sugimoto

  Character, People, Photographer

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• One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious.

  Hiroshi Sugimoto

  Religious, Night, Glowing

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• There have to be at least two copies of a photograph, otherwise it’s not a photograph.

  Thomas Ruff

  Two, Copies

  "A conversation with Thomas Ruff". Interview with Joerg Colberg, jmcolberg.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Just imagine the banner headlines if a marine biologist were to discover a species of dolphin that wove large, intricately meshed fishing nets, twenty dolphin-lengths in diameter! Yet we take a spider web for granted, as a nuisance in the house rather than as one of the wonders of the world. And think of the furore if Jane Goodall returned from Gombe stream with photographs of wild chimpanzees building their own houses, well roofed and insulated, of painstakingly selected stones neatly bonded and mortared! Yet caddis larvae, who do precisely that, command only passing interest.

  Richard Dawkins

  Marine, Thinking, Fishing

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• If you make an honest picture of war, it will be an antiwar photograph.

  James Nachtwey

  War, Honest, Ifs

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• It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.

  Sebastiao Salgado

  Believe, Differences, Honor

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