Photography Quotes - Page 24

• I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.

  Lewis Baltz

  Cameras, Wanted, Seeing

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• I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic.

  Lewis Baltz

  Powerful, Ideas, Essentials

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• I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.

  Lewis Baltz

  Distance, World, Used

  Interview with Matthew Witovsky, www.aaa.si.edu. November 15-17, 2009.

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• I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

  Lewis Baltz

  Art, Views, People

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• It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.

  Lewis Baltz

  Thinking, Might, Film

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• Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation.... photographing has become the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter.

  Geoffrey Batchen

  Documentation, Mediums, Visuals

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• The main difference seems to be that, whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging is an overtly fictional process. As a practice that is known to be capable of nothing but fabrication, digitization abandons even the rhetoric of truth that has been such an important part of photography's cultural success.

  Geoffrey Batchen

  Objectivity, Practice, Differences

  Geoffrey Batchen (2002). “Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History”, p.134, MIT Press

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• Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing.

  Geoffrey Batchen

  Sweet, Differences, World

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• Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.

  Geoffrey Batchen

  Past, Media, Two

  Geoffrey Batchen (2002). “Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History”, p.109, MIT Press

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• Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for real powers that always originate elsewhere.

  Geoffrey Batchen

  Real, Sides, Vehicle

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• We live in a time of the greatest precision and of maximum contrasts: photomontage offers us a means to express this. It shows ideas: photography shows us objects.

  Herbert Bayer

  Mean, Ideas, Precision

  Herbert Bayer, Beaumont Newhall (1977). “Herbert Bayer: Photographic Works an Exhibition”

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• All we did was to turn back the time to a photography of precision which is superior to the human eye.

  Bernd Becher

  Eye, Precision, Turns

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• Perhaps there was more authentic danger in the photography that was banned - why shouldn't one be able to produce it? But this new enthusiasm finally caused us some trouble, and it suffices to say, if I remember correctly, that it was in this way that my thoughts turned to the young maidens.

  Hans Bellmer

  Enthusiasm, Able, Way

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• [X-ray's] accidental discovery in the late 1800s fits seamlessly into modernity's fascination with, and belief in, the power of technological transparency: the desire to domesticate time (cinema), to preserve and capture the surface of the fleeting (photography), to see inside (x-ray).

  Walead Beshty

  Discovery, Desire, Rays

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• I'm not particularly invested in, nor do I really care about, photography in a general sense. It's a medium that's relatively ubiquitous, readily accessible, and that I have some facility with, so it makes sense for me to use it.

  Walead Beshty

  Use, Care, Mediums

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• Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (Title of a 16x20 inch photograph depicting an index card on which that phrase is handwritten.)

  Mel Bochner

  Ideas, Titles, Cards

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• Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism... and as things turned out, it was.

  Mel Bochner

  Enemy, Late, Modernism

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• In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic.

  Mel Bochner

  Art, Looks, Impossible

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• There is no other art with as great a democratic capacity as photography.

  Manuel Alvarez Bravo

  Art, Capacity, Democratic

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• In photography, the issue of the integration of form and content is exceptionally difficult because of the widely held belief that photographs must be a kind of vicarious experience of the subject itself.

  Peter C Bunnell

  Issues, Belief, Kind

  Peter C. Bunnell (2006). “Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography”, Aperture

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• To some extent, the cult surrounding black-and-white photography is based on nostalgia.

  Rene Burri

  Black And White, Nostalgia, Cult

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• I wanted not to make photographs that would be art, but art that would be photography.

  Jean-Marc Bustamante

  Art, Would Be, Wanted

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• I turned to photography because I thought it was the dominant language of our culture.

  Sarah Charlesworth

  Culture, Language, Dominant

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• I don't think of myself as a photographer. I've engaged questions regarding photography's role in culture... but it is an engagement with a problem rather than a medium.

  Sarah Charlesworth

  Thinking, Culture, Roles

  Sarah Charlesworth, Louis Grachos, Susan Fisher Sterling (1997). “Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective”

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• I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art.

  Jean-Francois Chevrier

  Art, Writing, People

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