Photography Quotes - Page 29

• Photography has a natural affinity for the strategies of surrealism - the exaltation of chance and eros, the exploration of obsession and the release of the unconscious.

  Douglas McCulloh

  Exaltation, Chance, Obsession

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• To teach consequential photography, don't bother with Photoshop or f-stops. Create a craving for images.

  Douglas McCulloh

  Photoshop, Teach, Bother

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• If you scratch through the deceitful artifice of contemporary photography, you'll find the real artifice underneath.

  Douglas McCulloh

  Real, Scratches, Deceitful

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• I can see today that the same sort of issues lie behind taxidermy and photography. Taxidermy consists in preserving a bird in full flight... In the same way, photography halts and freezes motion and life.

  Annette Messager

  Lying, Issues, Bird

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• [Love] can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds, or in a garden of tenderness like I have done - mixing writing, photography, and real spaces. There are all kinds of acts of love.

  Annette Messager

  Real, Writing, Garden

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• Photography is linked with death in many different ways. The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive. But there is another real death which each of us undergoes every day, as each day we draw nearer to our own death. Even when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was has forever vanished.

  Christian Metz

  Memories, Real, Practice

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• I would say that the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular and definitive cutting-off which figures castration and is figured by the click of the shutter.

  Christian Metz

  Cutting, Figures, Results

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• The importance of immobility and silence to photographic authority, the nonfilmic nature of this authority, leads me to some remarks on the relationship of photography with death. Immobility and silence are not only two objective aspects of death, they are also its main symbols, they figure it.

  Christian Metz

  Two, Silence, Authority

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• Photography is the mirror, more faithful than any actual mirror, in which we witness at every age, our own aging. The actual mirror accompanies us through time, thoughtfully and treacherously; it changes with us, so that we appear not to change.

  Christian Metz

  Mirrors, Accompany Us, Faithful

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• The digital tools allow us to have control over what and how we can alter an image that was unimaginable in the era of analog photography.

  Pedro Meyer

  Tools, Eras, Digital

  Pedro Meyer, Louis Kaplan (2006). “The Real and the True: The Digital Photography of Pedro Meyer”, New Riders Pub

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• Before, the myth of photography doesn't lie was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could.

  Pedro Meyer

  Lying, Reality, Order

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• [Photography] is the non-complacence of the eye. To practice my right to look is also a critical attitude. If I stare at you, I will make you uncomfortable, and culturally we have a difficulty of staring and being stared at.

  Pedro Meyer

  Attitude, Eye, Practice

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• My generation came at a time when photography was advancing by leaps and bounds, creating the impulse to experiment and seek new approaches.

  Gjon Mili

  Creating, Generations, Leaps And Bounds

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• Why should there be only one sort of photography? I want to create images with elements of my choosing, narrative or evocative... I give myself a literary frame, I tell a story.

  Sarah Moon

  Giving, Stories, Elements

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• [Photography] is always like a state of grace, like the appearance of something that I hadn't foreseen, that surprises me and stops me. If I only did what I had in mind, there would be no emotion. It would be like keeping one's eyes shut rather than open, like theorizing rather than seeing.

  Sarah Moon

  Eye, Grace, Mind

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• I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance.

  Sarah Moon

  Believe, Black And White, Color

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• There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.

  Abelardo Morell

  Forever, Done, Dull

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 2, 2003.

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• Photography was so perfectly suited to my sensibility and situation, it gave me a voice, a kind of crazy, out-of-whack voice, at the beginning, but a voice. I could finally put into images bottled up feelings of absurdity and alienation - and also joy and delight.

  Abelardo Morell

  Crazy, Voice, Joy

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• ...the very basics of photography [can] be potent and strange. So why not make pictures about the medium itself and see where they would take me?

  Abelardo Morell

  Why Not, Strange, Basics

  Abelardo Morell (1995). “A camera in a room: photographs”, Smithsonian Inst Pr

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• I wanted to go to the end of photography.

  Daido Moriyama

  Ends, Wanted

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• Photography, like any other art, is a form of communication. The artist is not blowing bubbles for his own gratification, but is speaking a language, is telling somebody something.

  William Mortensen

  Art, Communication, Language

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• I think one of the shortcomings of reality, of real experience, is most people's inability to examine something carefully and thoughtfully without moving around or being distracted by something else. What photography does really is it forces you to examine something you normally wouldn't.

  Grant Mudford

  Real, Moving, Thinking

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• One of the magical things about photography is the transformation that takes place when you photograph something. Something that inherently has very little going for it in terms of the interest you take in it, can become infinitely more interesting when rendered as a photograph. It's no longer a building. It's a photograph.

  Grant Mudford

  Interesting, Going For It, Littles

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• Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary struggle.

  Willi Munzenberg

  Struggle, Mean, Revolutionary

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• Photography works upon the human eye: what is seen is reflected in the brain without the need for complicated thought. In this way the bourgeoisie takes advantage of the mental indolence of the masses and does good business as well.

  Willi Munzenberg

  Eye, Brain, Bourgeoisie

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