Photographer Quotes - Page 35

• I'm aware of how lucky I am. Being able to make pretty good money, and get to do a lot of fun work, and at the same time I'm not besieged by photographers.

  John C. Reilly

  Fun, Lucky, Able

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• The photographer will never replace the painter; one is a man, the other a machine. Let us compare them no longer. (1848)

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Men, Machines, Compare

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• Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?

  Elie Wiesel

  Thinking, Sometimes, Storyteller

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• I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.

  August Strindberg

  Becoming, Talent

  August Strindberg (1968). “Inferno, Alone, and Other Writings: In New Translations”

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• Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people - but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them - or more, a comment upon their lives - or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives.

  Langston Hughes

  Taken, Order, Cities

  Langston Hughes (2002). “The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on art, race, politics, and world affairs”, p.141, University of Missouri Press

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• I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.

  John Waters

  Photography, Art, Jobs

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• So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Moving, Thinking, Artist

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• I like photographers - you don't ask questions. (To a gathering of the White House News Photographers Association)

  Ronald Reagan

  White, House, Gathering

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• [Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)

  Ernest Hemingway

  Good Friend, Brave, Luck

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• ...[the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse.

  Jack Kerouac

  Eye, Age, Hammers

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• Photographs [are] of course heavily dependent upon the culture, the disciplinary point of view and the idiosyncratic vision of the particular photographer-analyst.

  Margaret Mead

  Views, Vision, Culture

  Margaret Mead, Paul Byers (1968). “The small conference: An innovation in communication”, p.6, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

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• Anthropology... has always been highly dependent upon photography... As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly essential as a part of anthropological methods, the need for photographers with a disciplined knowledge of anthropology and for anthropologists with training in photography has increased. We expect that in the near future sophisticated training in photography will be a requirement for all anthropologists. (1962)

  Margaret Mead

  Photography, Moving, Training

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• A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.

  Jean Cocteau

  Poet, Painter

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• The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.

  Jean Cocteau

  Attitude, Reality, Balance

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• Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

  Henri Matisse

  Photography, Artist, World

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1995). “Matisse on Art”, p.44, Univ of California Press

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• All photography is Pop, and all photographers are crazy... they feel guilty since they don't have to do very much - just push a button.

  Andy Warhol

  Photography, Crazy, Buttons

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• Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )

  Italo Calvino

  Adventure, Circles, Stories

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• The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

  Roland Barthes

  Taken, Law, Interesting

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• A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

  John Berger

  Contradiction, Natural, Increase

  John Berger, Jean Mohr (2016). “Another Way of Telling: A Possible Theory of Photography”, p.4, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion; and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.

  Lewis Mumford

  Fashion, Fake, Events

  Lewis Mumford, Casey Nelson Blake (2000). “Art and Technics”, p.97, Columbia University Press

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• Is giving in to the photographer's presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times?

  David Byrne

  Light, Giving, Sometimes

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• Almost all photographers have incurred large expenses in the pursuit of tiny audiences, finding that the wonder they'd hoped to share is something few want to receive.

  Robert Adams

  Want, Tiny, Wonder

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

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• I've never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning - but some phase of photographer I've always been.

  Dorothea Lange

  Phases

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• People were murdered for the camera; and some photographers and a television camera crew departed without taking a picture in the hope that in the absence of cameramen acts might not be committed. Others felt that the mob was beyond appeal to mercy. They stayed and won Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right?

  Harold Evans

  People, Departed, Cameras

  Harold Evans (1978). “Editing and Design: Pictures on a page”

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• What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.

  Walter Benjamin

  Use, Demand, Revolutionary

  Walter Benjamin (2003). “Understanding Brecht (New Edition)”, p.95, Verso

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