Photography Quotes - Page 23

• 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

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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

  Mean, Giving, Vision

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• 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”

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• 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”

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• When photography was invented, people had to make room in their minds for the idea that the dead would always be visible.

  Vicki Goldberg

  Ideas, People, Mind

  Vicki Goldberg (1991). “The power of photography: how photographs changed our lives”, Abbeville Pr

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• 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”

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• We used the camera only as a means of expression and as a visual medium that offers possibilities found in no other artistic technique, possibilities that the eye cannot catch in their totality. We tried to establish a characteristic vision of photography.

  Piet Zwart

  Mean, Eye, Expression

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• Even in ordinary reproduction [photography] verges on facsimile.

  Stephen Shore

  Ordinary, Verge, Reproduction

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• A man with a camera was always suspected of being a spy. Moreover, the Jews did not want to be photographed, due to a misunderstanding of the prohibition against making graven images (photography had not been invented when the Torah was written!). I was forced to use a hidden camera.

  Roman Vishniac

  Men, Spy, Cameras

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• What makes [photography] obscene is its terrible cruelty. Happiness may be fleeting, but it's the reason we go on living. Photography is the joy that precedes pain, the moment of life just before death.

  Nobuyoshi Araki

  Pain, Joy, Fleeting

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• I always said it kept me alive - photography - because it did. It was my catharsis.

  Bruce Gilden

  Catharsis, Alive, Said

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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

  Watches, Photographer, Stage

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

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• So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but a human wish, intensifying since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation - a wish for power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another... Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the act of reproduction.

  Stanley Cavell

  Long, Wish, Doe

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• I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better.

  Nan Goldin

  Something Better, Can Do Something, I Can

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• I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.

  Eleanor Antin

  Dubious, Fiction, Facts

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• In my years of photography I have learned that many things can be sensed, seen, shaped, or resolved in a realm of quiet, well in advance of, or between, the actual clicking of shutters and the sloshing of films and papers in chemical solutions. I work to attain a state of heart, a gentle space offering inspirational substance that could purify one's vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of the spirit.

  Paul Caponigro

  Heart, Space, Offering

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• No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.

  David Wojnarowicz

  Art, Dollars, World

  David Wojnarowicz (2017). “Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration”, p.127, Canongate Books

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• Even a fellow with a camera has his favourite subjects, as we can see looking through the Kodak-albums of our friends. One amateur prefers the family group, another bathing scenes, another cows upon an alp, or kittens held upside down in the arms of a black-faced child. The tendency to choose one subject rather than another indicates the photographer's temperament. Nevertheless, his passion is for photography rather than for selection, a kitten will serve when no cows are available.

  E. M. Forster

  Children, Passion, Black

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• It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Skills, Choices

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• In the business of portrait photography, one must combine the artist and the craftsman.

  Louis Fabian Bachrach, Jr.

  Artist, Portraits, Craftsman

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• White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.

  Dieter Appelt

  Light, Color White, Shadow

  Sylvia Wolf, Dieter Appelt, Wieland Schmied (1994). “Dieter Appelt”, Art Institute of Chicago

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• Don't you think that it is necessary to have a sense of brutality in photography?

  Nobuyoshi Araki

  Thinking, Brutality

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• It's entirely ridiculous and hopeless to try to compete with somebody who made such a huge contribution to photography... I knew when I went into photography that I would be compared to my mother. I thought to myself, what can I do about that?

  Amy Arbus

  Mother, Trying, Would Be

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• Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump. I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women.

  J. G. Ballard

  Children, Distance, Imagination

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• [Photography] tells you that every second in time is different from every other second. You want people to understand that the image in front of them has something to do with the truth, and it can never be repeated.

  Roger Ballen

  People, Different, Want

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