Photography Quotes - Page 25

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 has not invented anything.

  Jean-Francois Chevrier

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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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• It was only with the emergence of the Conceptualist approaches of the late 1960s that the opposition between artists using photography and photographers became explicit.

  Jean-Francois Chevrier

  Artist, Photographer, Late

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• Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks.

  Philip-Lorca diCorcia

  Thinking, Language, Speak

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• Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.

  Douglas Crimp

  Art, Definitions, Environment

  Douglas Crimp, Louise Lawler (1995). “On the Museum's Ruins”, p.134, MIT Press

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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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• For me, photography must be visual, rather than intellectual and ideological.

  Roy DeCarava

  Intellectual, Visuals, Ideological

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• Photography works hand in glove with image and memory and therefore possesses their notable epidemic power.

  Georges Didi-Huberman

  Memories, Epidemics, Hands

  Georges Didi-Huberman (2008). “Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz”, p.23, University of Chicago Press

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• ... the battle for the acceptance of photography as Art was not only counter-productive but counter-revolutionary. The most important photography is most emphatically not Art.

  A. D. Coleman

  Art, Acceptance, Important

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• Photography is, and has been since its conception, a fabulously broad church. Contemporary practice demonstrates that the medium can be a prompt, a process, a vehicle, a collective pursuit, and not just the physical end product of solitary artists' endeavors.

  Charlotte Cotton

  Artist, Practice, Church

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• I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there's always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense... This is what drives you to the next picture.

  Gregory Crewdson

  Thinking, Perfect, Needs

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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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• There is something beautiful about photography; it allows the self to be reunited with the world.

  Luc Delahaye

  Beautiful, Self, World

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• I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.

  Luc Delahaye

  War, Adventure, Grace

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• Fashion is the opposite of the real, its worst enemy. Fashion photography is subversive; it makes you believe everything is true, whereas this could not be more false. It is the opposite of a mirror, a deformation.

  Patrick Demarchelier

  Fashion, Real, Believe

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• Photography has fooled the world. There's no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.

  Edmundo Desnoes

  Reality, Men, Expression

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• The Latin American photographer has the possibility, and the means, for naming the things of our world, for demonstrating that there is another kind of beauty, that the faces of the First World are not the only ones. These Indian, black, plundered white and mestizo faces are the first element defining the demographic content of our photography.

  Edmundo Desnoes

  Latin, Mean, White

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• [Photography is a] hair-raising joy ride in a medium that, despite being a mechanical trick, can break down the division between mind and matter like a superhero, or an artist.

  Philip-Lorca diCorcia

  Artist, Hair, Joy

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• In the beginning of my photography I controlled everything: rearranging the room, lighting it, and telling people what to do and where to put their hands. By the last project, I was basically totally at the mercy of serendipity.

  Philip-Lorca diCorcia

  Hands, People, Serendipity

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• There's a reductiveness to photography, of course - in the framing of reality and the exclusion of chunks of it (the rest of the world, in fact). It's almost as if the act of photography bears some relationship to how we consciously manage the uncontrollable set of possibilities that exist in life.

  Philip-Lorca diCorcia

  Reality, Facts, Bears

  "Revisiting the Winogrand Archive: Philip Lorca diCorcia in Conversation with Leo Rubinfien". Interview with Leo Rubinfien, aperture.org.

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• It's good to be around people who see [photography] as a reasonable enterprise when everyone in the neighborhood may think it's ridiculous. (On the benefit of teaching photography)

  John Divola

  Teaching, Thinking, People

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