Photography Quotes - Page 30

• Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.

  Vik Muniz

  Thinking, Way, Digital

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• I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.

  Vik Muniz

  Hate, Confused, Mean

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• Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.

  Laurel Nakadate

  Ideas, Imagination, Finals

  Interview with Scott Indrisek, www.believermag.com. October 2006.

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• I believe photography is about choosing to live, being brave. Looking is an act of courage. It's terrifying. It's possible to see too much, to witness things that we cannot hold.

  Laurel Nakadate

  Believe, Brave, Too Much

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• Photography has saved my life, over and over again.

  Laurel Nakadate

  Saved

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• [Photography] ties back into this feeling of wanting to watch things fall and the moment before they break. Fireworks are that way for me - this lovely thing that blows up and is gone. It all goes back to this desire to record things before they disappear - the original reason we take pictures, right?

  Laurel Nakadate

  Fall, Blow, Ties

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• Photography does not form a separate, barren field of art. It is only a means of execution, uniform, rapid and sure, which serves the artist by reproducing with mathematical precision the form and effect of objects and even that poetry which at once arises from any harmonious combination.

  Charles Negre

  Art, Mean, Doe

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• If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854)

  Charles Negre

  Art, Poetic, Exactitude

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• Photography is more than a window for me. Photography is more like a space that tries to capture situations.

  Gabriel Orozco

  Space, Trying, Window

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• I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.

  Paul Outerbridge

  Art, Eye, Feelings

  Graham Howe, Paul Outerbridge, Jacqueline Markham (1980). “Paul Outerbridge, Jr: photographs”

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• As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.

  Craig Owens

  Art, Desire, Ephemeral

  Craig Owens, Scott Stewart Bryson (1994). “Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture”, p.56, Univ of California Press

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• [My photography teacher] gave me the Mexican Day Books of Edward Weston and just blew me away with this work. The fact that you could be this fabulous visual artist, with all this milieu of people like Diego Rivera and you could sleep with these gorgeous, amazing women, that you could live that life - that photography could deliver you that life.

  Max Pam

  Teacher, Book, Sleep

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• Photography's about the surface, what's happening at the top of the sea. Literature's about all the stuff below.

  Max Pam

  Sea, Literature, Stuff

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• I believe that the (distorting) mirror which is photography holds an intrinsic, even elemental, relation to writing.

  Tod Papageorge

  Believe, Writing, Mirrors

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• Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government.

  Rondal Partridge

  Art, Government, Use

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• There is not a big difference between life and taking pictures... You're in the middle of life, you're living, making love, eating, sleeping - and photography is part of it. And I don't say this because I'm being romantic. I say this because that's just the way it happens to be.

  Anders Petersen

  Sleep, Differences, Making Love

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• The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting.

  Sylvia Plachy

  Artist, Shooting, Life Is

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• I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It's the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first.

  Robert Polidori

  Thinking, Sight, Rooms

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• At the end of the day, photography is ninety-nine percent business, connections, and politics and one percent creativity.

  Rankin

  Creativity, Ninety Nine, The End Of The Day

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• Let us... leave art to the artists, and let us try to use the medium of photography to create photographs that can endure because of their photographic qualities.

  Albert Renger-Patzsch

  Art, Trying, Quality

  Albert Renger-Patzsch, Donald Burton Kuspit, J. Paul Getty Museum (1993). “Albert Renger-Patzsch: joy before the object”, Getty Publications

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• In photography one should surely proceed from essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone.

  Albert Renger-Patzsch

  Essence, Should, Term

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• ... modern life is no longer thinkable without photography.

  Albert Renger-Patzsch

  Modern Life, Life Is, Thinkable

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• There was a time when one looked over one's shoulder with an ironical smile at the photographer and when photography as a profession seemed almost invariably a target for ridicule. That time is now over.

  Albert Renger-Patzsch

  Target, Photographer, Shoulders

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• To do justice to modern technology's rigid linear structure, to the lofty gridwork of cranes and bridges, to the dynamism of machines operating at one thousand horsepower - only photography is capable of that. What those who are attached to the painterly style regard as photography's defect, the mechanical reproduction of form - is just what makes it superior to all other means of expression.

  Albert Renger-Patzsch

  Mean, Technology, Expression

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• ...it is pretentious for photographers to believe that their pictures alone change things. If they did, we wouldn't be besieged by war, by incidents of genocide, by hunger. A more realistic assessment of photography's value is to point out that it is illustrative of what's going on, that it provides a record of history, that photographs can prompt dialogue.

  Eugene Richards

  War, Believe, Assessment

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