Photographer Quotes - Page 39

• We feel more emotion... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.

  Chris Marker

  Art, Levels, Personal History

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• I think that it was a great advantage to go into photography not knowing much about it. Not thinking. I think one of the problems with many photographers today is that they never see for themselves, but just like everybody else.

  Robert Mapplethorpe

  Photography, Thinking, Knowing

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• ... I just feel impotent - I don't know which way to start or turn. You know what they say about a prophet in one's own country - well - in a way it works for me too: you see - this might be called my home town - well of all the old friends and acquaintances not one takes me seriously as a photographer - not one has asked me to show my work... (On returning to San Francisco)

  Tina Modotti

  Country, Home, San Francisco

  Tina Modotti, Amy Rule (1986). “The Letters from Tina Modotti to Edward Weston”

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• The majority of photographers still seek artistic effects, imitating other mediums of graphic expression. The result is a hybrid product that does not succeed in giving their work the most valuable characteristic it should have, - photographic quality.

  Tina Modotti

  Expression, Should Have, Giving

  Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, Whitechapel Art Gallery (1982). “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti”

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• ... any dodge, or trick, or conjuration of any kind is open to the photographer's use so that it belongs to his art and is not false to nature. If the dodges, tricks, etc., lead the photographer astray, so much the worse for him; if they do not assist him to represent nature, he is not fit to use them. It is not the fault of the dodges, it is the fault of the bungler.

  Henry Peach Robinson

  Art, Use, Etc

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• The aim and end of the artist is not truth exactly, much less fact; it is effect... There is no doubt he [the photographer] best gets his effect by way of truth, but he uses it as he would a servant, not a master.

  Henry Peach Robinson

  Artist, Doubt, Use

  Henry Peach Robinson (1896). “The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph”

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• Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.)

  Alfred Stieglitz

  Perfect, Rotten, Standards

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• ...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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• [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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• I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography.

  Sebastiao Salgado

  Photography, School, Economist

  "Sebastião Salgado's best shot". Interview With Leo Benedictus, www.theguardian.com. May 27, 2009.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.

  Sebastiao Salgado

  Photography, Portraits, Machines

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• We photographers say that we take a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people's lives, but in doing so we tell their story.

  Steve McCurry

  People, Stories, Certain

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