Photographer Quotes - Page 38

• ...the questions a photographer raises may be more profound than the answers the medium permits.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Profound, Answers, May

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.136, Univ of California Press

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• At birth we begin to discover that shapes, sounds, lights, and textures have meaning. Long before we learn to talk, sounds and images form the world we live in. All our lives, that world is more immediate than words and difficult to articulate. Photography, reflecting those images with uncanny accuracy, evokes their associations and our instant conviction. The art of the photographer lies in using those connotations, as a poet uses the connotations of words and a musician the tonal connotations of sounds.

  Nancy Newhall

  Photography, Art, Lying

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• [Photographer Julian Wasser] had this great idea that I should play chess naked with Marcel Duchamp and it seem to be such a great idea that it was just like the best idea I'd ever heard in my life. It was like a great idea. I mean, it was - Not only was it vengeance, it was art, and it was, like, a great idea. And even if it didn't get any vengeance, it would still turn out okay with me because, you know, I would be sort of immortalized.

  Eve Babitz

  Art, Mean, Play

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• New images surround us everywhere. They are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear. To find these images is to dare to see, to be aware of what there is and how it is. The photographer not only gets information, he gives information about life.

  Lisette Model

  Giving, Information, Routine

  Ann Thomas, Lisette Model, National Gallery of Canada (1990). “Lisette Model”, National Gallery of Canada

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• Photography starts with the projection of the photographer, his understanding of life and himself into the picture.

  Lisette Model

  Photography, Understanding, Projection

  Ann Thomas, Lisette Model, National Gallery of Canada (1990). “Lisette Model”, National Gallery of Canada

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• It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation.

  Brassai

  Insight, Vocation, Sociologists

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• What attracts the photographer is precisely the chance to penetrate inside phenomena, to uncover forms... He pursues them into their last refuges and surprises them at their most positive, their most material and true.

  Brassai

  Lasts, Chance, Surprise

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• Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.

  Don McCullin

  Photography, Eye, Thinking

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• As a photographer you enlarge or emphasize a certain moment, making it another reality.

  Rineke Dijkstra

  Reality, Moments, Certain

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• I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists?

  John Baldessari

  Artist, Glasses, Snow

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• The public is being spoiled by good technical quality photographs in magazines, on television, in the movies, and they have become bored. The disease of our age is this boredom and a good photographer must successfully combat it. The only way to do this is by invention - by surprise.

  Alexey Brodovitch

  Boredom, Age, Quality

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• Astonish me! (Instruction to photographers)

  Alexey Brodovitch

  Instruction

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• When I first started making photo pieces it wasn't with the idea of a commitment to the medium. I didn't think I would have to become a photographer to make my photographs. I recall that anything could be used as material for art in that era. Photography was just one more thing.

  William Wegman

  Photography, Art, Commitment

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• ... in the eyes of its visitors, Venice has no reality of its own. Anyone visiting the place has already seen so many pictures of it that they can only attempt to view it via these clichés, and they take home photographs of Venice that are similar to the ones they already knew. Venice [is] becoming like one of those painted backdrops that photographers use in their studio.

  Christian Boltanski

  Eye, Home, Reality

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• Photography isolates the world via an aperture and gives the photographer the means to see differently, to achieve a spontaneous vision that is direct and uncompromising.

  Ellsworth Kelly

  Photography, Mean, Giving

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• The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.

  Beaumont Newhall

  Challenges, Form, Significance

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• In 1968 I frequently would sit in a photo booth and practice self mirror images which I then documented photographically. Curious types would always open the curtains and chase me away. Today I work with a photographer.

  Arnulf Rainer

  Mirrors, Self, Practice

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• To convulse reality from within, to demonstrate it as fractured spacing, became the collective result of all that vast range of techniques to which surrealist photographers resorted and which they understood as producing the characteristics of the sign.

  Rosalind E. Krauss

  Reality, Technique, Characteristics

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• Photographers, it is true, do not work but they do do something: They create, process, and store symbols.

  Vilem Flusser

  Process, Stores, Symbols

  Vilém Flusser (2013). “Towards a Philosophy of Photography”, p.25, Reaktion Books

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• Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers... have not understood information. What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.

  Vilem Flusser

  Memories, Victory, Cameras

  Vilém Flusser (2013). “Towards a Philosophy of Photography”, p.59, Reaktion Books

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• Photographers encode their concepts as photographic images so as to give others information, so as to produce models for them and thereby to become immortal in the memory of others.

  Vilem Flusser

  Memories, Giving, Information

  Vilém Flusser (2000). “Towards a Philosophy of Photography”, p.48, Reaktion Books

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• Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

  Peter Beard

  Photography, Fashion, Thinking

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• One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.

  Stanley Cavell

  Photography, Watches, Stage

  Stanley Cavell (1979). “The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film”, p.90, Harvard University Press

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• Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation.

  Marc Riboud

  Choices, Existential, Lifetime

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• Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity, and when you're photographing children there's often an abundance of it. I would have an idea of what a photograph would look like and then something would happen - a dog might lumber in and become a critical element. I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.

  Sally Mann

  Dog, Children, Angel

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