Photography Quotes - Page 31

• It's a process of getting to know people. That's what photography is to me. It's about paying attention, not screwing up and blowing a great opportunity.

  Eugene Richards

  Opportunity, People, Attention

  4 Copy quote

• In fact, the new malleability of the image may eventually lead to a profound undermining of photography's status as an inherently truthful pictorial form... If even a minimal confidence in photography does not survive, it is questionable whether many pictures will have meaning anymore, not only as symbols but as evidence.

  Fred Ritchin

  Profound, Doe, May

  7 Copy quote

• I always believed that photography was subjective, interpretive and certainly did not represent the truth, but I did think that its status as a societal and historical referent needed to be both safeguarded and illuminated....now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort.

  Fred Ritchin

  Thinking, Historical, Shock

  4 Copy quote

• The decisive moment, the popular Henri Cartier-Bresson approach to photography in which a scene is stopped and depicted at a certain point of high visual drama, is now possible to achieve at any time. One's photographs, years later, may be retroactively rephotographed by repositioning the photographer or the subject of the photograph, or by adding elements that were never there before but now are made to exist concurrently in a newly elastic sense of space and time.

  Fred Ritchin

  Drama, Years, Space

  Fred Ritchin (1990). “In our own image: the coming revolution in photography : how computer technology is changing our view of the world”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Straight photography, following the medium, is intoxicating - trying to wrestle it into the form of a poem.

  Thomas Roma

  Trying, Form, Mediums

  Interview with Alex Klein, Bettina Shzu, www.museomagazine.com. 2000.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The question is not whether a picture is good, in some formal, technical sense, but, does it mean what I need it to mean? Writers can edit sentences that may be well-crafted but that don't express an intended thought. But in photography, there are no revisions: A photograph is in or it's out, and the photographer must live with the consequences of his or her choices.

  Thomas Roma

  Mean, Choices, Doe

  6 Copy quote

• I approached photography the only way that I knew how to approach anything: as a job. I would get up, photograph all morning, stop and have lunch, and then, photograph all afternoon. I didn't think that I had to wait for some inspiration.

  Thomas Roma

  Morning, Jobs, Inspiration

  Interview with Alex Klein, Bettina Shzu, www.museomagazine.com. 2000.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Photography [can] be seen as a system of representation that you bring to bear on other systems.

  Martha Rosler

  Bears, Representation

  17 Copy quote

• Any familiarity with photographic history shows that manipulation is integral to photography.

  Martha Rosler

  Manipulation, Shows, Familiarity

  Martha Rosler (2004). “Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001”, p.262, MIT Press

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust.

  Thomas Ruff

  Believe, People, Way

  8 Copy quote

• You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it.

  Thomas Ruff

  World, Cameras, Whole

  "Journal of Contemporary Art" Interview with Philip Pocock, www.jca-online.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.

  Thomas Ruff

  Mediums, Subjects

  9 Copy quote

• Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

  Sebastiao Salgado

  Symbolism, Able, Language

  19 Copy quote

• I am interested in marginality, in immaturity, in naïveté, in illusion, in fictions, in transitions, in the fact that at a certain moment in life there is no limit. I would like my photography to pose a question rather than make a precise statement.

  Lise Sarfati

  Immaturity, Transition, Vets

  6 Copy quote

• The most striking feature of the new is the sheer mass. Photography was previously a mass phenomenon, but now, quantity is doubtless the outstanding quality. For a long time photos have been taken frequently and everywhere, but now photos are taken permanently and everywhere,... What is new is that we can watch them practically in real time.

  Joachim Schmid

  Real, Taken, Long

  6 Copy quote

• For the first time in the history of photography, we can study the real-time production of snapshot making - globally! (On Flickr and other photosharing websites)

  Joachim Schmid

  Real, Firsts, Snapshots

  4 Copy quote

• Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.

  Allan Sekula

  Promise, Mastery, Anarchy

  6 Copy quote

• Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.

  Allan Sekula

  Envy, Understanding, Mountain

  Allan Sekula, Illinois State University. University Galleries (1999). “Dismal science: photo works, 1972-1996”, Illinois State Univ

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?

  Allan Sekula

  Memories, Historical, Doe

  Allan Sekula, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (2002). “Fish story”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm not modest about myself. I know for a fact that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put things together. I expound vociferously to students of architecture and photography, the significance of design. A photograph is a design in which you assemble thoughts in your mind.

  Julius Shulman

  Design, Mind, Together

  16 Copy quote

• And I was very successful at baby photography... Strange isn't it? Because some of my portraits of babies were - I used dramatic lighting, shadow lighting, and I didn't use flash. We didn't have flash in those days, we just had floodlights, and I was photographing babies as I would an object - an inanimate object, for that matter.

  Julius Shulman

  Baby, Successful, Shadow

  11 Copy quote

• It's all the same. It's the same face. We always look for an idea, for the same face, for the same position. There is no such thing as a European or an African photography. It's all the same thing.

  Malick Sidibe

  Ideas, Looks, Faces

  9 Copy quote

• If I have caught myself struggling to remember, it was, if not a pretense, at least premature, in that I only ever used photography for my own pleasure - even if I then bewailed the vanished pleasure which my pictures brought back to me.

  Jeanloup Sieff

  Struggle, Remember, Pleasure

  4 Copy quote

• All aspects of photography interest me and I feel for the female body the same curiosity and the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case, the nude is a form of landscape. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model.

  Jeanloup Sieff

  Curiosity, Body, Landscape

  8 Copy quote

• There is no truth in photography. One can't reproduce an absolute truth. That said, I don't see [my photographs] as being any less truthful than any other photographs.

  Taryn Simon

  Truthful, Said, Absolute Truth

  9 Copy quote