Photography Quotes - Page 22

• 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

  Mean, Giving, Vision

  24 Copy quote

• Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.

  Charles Sheeler

  Eye, Artist, Inward

  Charles Sheeler (1968). “Charles Sheeler: Essays by Martin Friedman, Bartlett Hayes [and] Charles Millard”

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• I feel shabby - because I've made a name, quite a good name, out of photography. And I still find myself asking the same questions: Who am I? What am I supposed to be? What have I done?

  Don McCullin

  Names, Asking, Done

  9 Copy quote

• What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?

  John Szarkowski

  Cat, Thinking, Years

  11 Copy quote

• My work is my language and I don't discuss it very easily. It's difficult for me to verbalize my feelings, or to intellectualize my work. In fact, it used to annoy me when Ansel Adams and Paul Strand yak-yak-yakked about what photography meant, and I told them so.

  Brett Weston

  Feelings, Facts, Yaks

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Commitment, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I just picked up a camera without any kind of ambition to be good or bad. And especially without any ambition to make a living... My whole freedom working in photography comes because I say to myself, Let's see what is going on in this world. Let's find out. How do these people look?

  Lisette Model

  Ambition, People, Looks

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

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Art, Memories, Literature

  "Looking Back" by Peter Schjeldahl, www.newyorker.com. March 21, 2005.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.

  John Baldessari

  Painting, Hybrid

  6 Copy quote

• ... photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to the thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches.

  Rosalind E. Krauss

  Beach, Real, Glasses

  12 Copy quote

• It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.

  Beaumont Newhall

  Important, Historian, Has Beens

  Beaumont Newhall (1984). “In plain sight: the photographs of Beaumont Newhall”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For me, the importance of photography is that you can point to something, that you can let other people see things. Ultimately, it is a matter of the specialness of the ordinary.

  Rineke Dijkstra

  People, Ordinary, Matter

  6 Copy quote

• The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography.

  Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

  Real, Unique, Keys

  László Moholy-Nagy, Renate Heyne, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Molderings (2009). “Moholy-Nagy: the photograms : catalogue raisonné”, Hatje Cantz Pub

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• Photography is used to give evidence, and the evidence is always deceiving.

  Christian Boltanski

  Giving, Deceiving, Used

  16 Copy quote

• In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies - that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.

  Christian Boltanski

  Lying, Reality, Order

  20 Copy quote

• The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Art, Eye, Pride

  "Seeing and Reading" by Peter Schjeldahl, www.newyorker.com. July 26, 2004.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

  Beaumont Newhall

  Years, Flow, Records

  Beaumont Newhall (1984). “In plain sight: the photographs of Beaumont Newhall”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I feel very lucky. I don't know what else there has to be. I'm happy, as corny as it sounds, to be living in a place where it's easy to live, easy to drive to the airport, easy to go pick up something at the supermarket and to have a circle of friends. Those were my goals in 1998, not to be queen of photography but to make a cultural adjustment to the West. And those are still more important goals to me than professional ones right now.

  Andrea Modica

  Queens, Circles, Airports

  6 Copy quote

• I am trying to make some kind of connection to what is going on in the world, to make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers.

  Leon Golub

  Trying, Connections, Use

  10 Copy quote

• The painter... will find [photography] a rapid way of making collections of studies he could otherwise obtain only with much time and trouble and, whatever his talents might be, in a far less perfect manner.

  Paul Delaroche

  Perfect, Might, Way

  8 Copy quote

• The act of photography is that of phenomenological doubt to the extent that it attempts to approach phenomena from any number of viewpoints.

  Douglas Huebler

  Numbers, Doubt, Viewpoints

  4 Copy quote

• By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression.

  Rosalind E. Krauss

  Art, Self, Expression

  17 Copy quote

• Photography's vaunted capture of a moment in time is the seizure and freezing of presence. It is the image of simultaneity, of the way that everything within a given space at a given moment is present to everything else; it is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the real.

  Rosalind E. Krauss

  Integrity, Real, Space

  Rosalind E. Krauss (1986). “The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths”, p.107, MIT Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon [the] possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.

  Vilem Flusser

  Philosophy, Giving, Tasks

  Vilém Flusser (2013). “Towards a Philosophy of Photography”, p.82, Reaktion Books

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Fashion, Thinking, Photographer

  6 Copy quote