Photographer Quotes - Page 19

• Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

  Robert Adams

  Art, Trying, Doe

  Robert Adams (1989). “Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values”

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• The word beauty is unavoidable … it accounts for my decision to photograph … There appeared a quality, beauty seemed the only appropriate word for it, in certain photographs, and I am compelled to live with the vocabulary of this new sight … through over many years [I] still find it embarrassing to use the word beauty, I fear I will be attacked for it, but I still believe in it.

  Robert Adams

  Believe, Vocabulary, Sight

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• What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.

  Robert Adams

  Morning, Sunday, Artist

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• The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.

  Robert Adams

  Art, Long, People

  Robert Adams (1989). “Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values”

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• I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.

  William Eggleston

  People, Appreciate, Imagine

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• I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.

  William Eggleston

  Interesting, Quality, Down And

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• Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

  William Eggleston

  Drawing, Peculiar, Might

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• There is no particular reason to search for meaning.

  William Eggleston

  Reason, Search For Meaning, Particular

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• After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That's not a record to be proud of.

  Daniel Silva

  Country, Fall, Practice

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• Guys don't understand great art. They don't care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer to record emotion that only the heart can see. They're threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was pissed when I brought my Nikon to the prom, but I'd missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base.

  Joan Bauer

  Art, Years, Guy

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• The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.

  Paul Strand

  Light, Space, Tree

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• Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Art, Style

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• The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Independent, Eye

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• Photographer's advice: Stand in the right place.

  David Douglas Duncan

  Advice, Right Place

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• I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.

  Alec Soth

  Book, Thinking, Narrative

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

  James Whistler

  Photography, Kings, Flower

  James M. Whistler (2012). “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”, p.107, Courier Corporation

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• I was one of Them: the Strange Ones. The Funny People. The Odd Tribes of autograph collectors and photographers. The Ones who waited through long days and nights, who used other people's dreams for their lives.

  Ray Bradbury

  Dream, Night, Long

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• a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Different, Realism, Products

  Vincent van Gogh (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated)”, p.2765, Delphi Classics

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• The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color ? to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merly decorative. Some photographers use it brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty.

  Mary Ellen Mark

  Photography, Color, Use

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• But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they're taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it's a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it's unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.

  Damien Hirst

  Photography, Taken, Light

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• Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.

  Edward Weston

  Art, Upheaval, Modern

  Edward Weston, Peter C. Bunnell, David Featherstone, Robert Adams (1986). “EW:100: centennial essays in honor of Edward Weston”

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• Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow.

  Frederick Sommer

  Photography, Art, Ideas

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• We work for that part of our vision which is uncompleted.

  Frederick Sommer

  Photography, Vision

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• The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.

  Andre Kertesz

  Art, Discovery, Art Is

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• I do what I feel, that's all. I am an ordinary photographer working for his own pleasure. That's all I've ever done.

  Andre Kertesz

  Ordinary, Done, Pleasure

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