Photographer Quotes - Page 36

• The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Artist, Views, Interesting

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• One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance.

  Peter Brook

  Photography, Reality, Views

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• The images which the [press] photographer has filtered from reality, whether particular events or the anguish of human reactions to them, already bear a stamp of authenticity which the photographer is powerless to alter by one jot or tittle; the meaning of the objects, by a process of purification, itself becomes the theme of the work.

  Yukio Mishima

  Reality, Events, Bears

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• If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead.

  Yukio Mishima

  Mean, Artist, Firsts

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• Photographers aren't artists, for goodness sake.

  Diana Vreeland

  Artist, Sake, Goodness

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• The vast number of photographers, feeding on anything visible, overgraze the landscape the way cattle overgraze their pasture.

  Wright Morris

  Numbers, Landscape, Way

  Wright Morris (1989). “Time pieces: photographs, writing, and memory”

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• My friend, why should you wish to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow? (To photographer Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy.)

  Crazy Horse

  Valentine, Wish, Shadow

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• When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Art, Real

  Jeff Rosenheim, Walker Evans, Jane Ninas, Historic New Orleans Collection (1991). “Walker Evans and Jane Ninas in New Orleans, 1935-1936”, Historic New Orleans

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• I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )

  Berenice Abbott

  Girl, Art, Nice

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• Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are camera lies, inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for naturalism in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures.

  Andreas Feininger

  Photography, Lying, Battle

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• You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)

  Michael Ondaatje

  Night, New Orleans, Hands

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “Coming Through Slaughter”, p.45, A&C Black

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• Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)

  Michael Ondaatje

  Dog, New Orleans, Naked

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• Photographers find themselves directly in competition with mass media's misrepresentations of women. So the photographic terrain is particularly contested from a political point of view.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Views, Media, Political

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• Given the lack of public skills in reading photographs, given that photographic content is sometimes buried in beauty, contemporary landscape photographers are often condemned to making pretty pictures. Dramatic clouds and sifting light can overwhelm more mundane information. Yet who can resist beautiful landscape pictures of one kind or another? Not I.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Beautiful, Reading, Skills

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• When everything that is called art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousands of candles whose power is contained in his flame, and the sensitive paper absorbed by degrees the blackness cut out of some ordinary object. He had invented a fresh and tender flash of lightning.

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, Cutting, Flames

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• If I'd had the nerve, I'd have become a thief or a gangster, but since I didn't, I became a photographer.

  Man Ray

  Thieves, Nerves, Gangsters

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• For a photographer, the first 70 years are a bit difficult, but after that things get better.

  Robert Doisneau

  Years, Get Better, Firsts

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• You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.

  Robert Doisneau

  Ideas, Lines, Hunters

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• The photographer must be absorbent - like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment... His technique should be like an animal function... he should act automatically.

  Robert Doisneau

  Animal, Technique, Poetic

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• There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.

  Janet Malcolm

  Burning, Might

  Janet Malcolm (1997). “Diana & Nikon: Essays on Photography”

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• [The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.

  Janet Malcolm

  Photography, Responsibility, Unique

  Janet Malcolm (1997). “Diana & Nikon: Essays on Photography”

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• In a way, it's like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I'm known for are not really my image, they're always the photographer's vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image.

  Kate Moss

  People, Vision, Different

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• I guess I'm adaptable. You know, I turn up at work and [photographers] can kind of do what they want with me, really.

  Kate Moss

  Want, Kind, Turns

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• There is a myth that the portrait photographer is supposed to make the subject relax, and that's the real person. But I'm interested in whatever is going on. And I'm not that comfortable myself.

  Annie Leibovitz

  Real, Relax, Portraits

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• What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion.

  Eve Arnold

  Curiosity, Needs, Digestion

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