Photography Quotes - Page 31

• What I like so much about photography is precisely the moment that cannot be anticipated; one must be constantly on the alert, ready to acclaim the unexpected.

  Martine Franck

  Unexpected, Moments, Acclaim

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• Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

  Gregory Crewdson

  Art, Moving, Culture

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• We have a few things in common - smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house. (To photographer Juergen Teller)

  William Eggleston

  Drinking, House, Smoking

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• There are religions in which the representation of the world is banned as an usurpation of the power of a God, creator of all things. It is very possible that photography is a trick of the devil and each shot is a sin.

  Joan Fontcuberta

  Devil, World, Sin

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• Photography... has lived under the tyranny of its subject matter: the object has exercised an almost total domination.

  Joan Fontcuberta

  Matter, Tyranny, Domination

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• Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.

  Joan Fontcuberta

  Lying, Believe, Doe

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• Photography mirrored the [nineteenth century] will towards rigor, towards defining details, the need for miniscule description, the long-distance optics, for technology at the service of truth, for concepts of credibility, of objectivity, the need to archive, for the consolidation of institutions like the museum, in short, towards a need to control memory.

  Joan Fontcuberta

  Memories, Distance, Technology

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• I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.

  Joan Fontcuberta

  Needs, Use, Documentaries

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• Photographing is an emotional thing, a graceful thing. Photography allows me to wander with a purpose.

  Leonard Freed

  Emotional, Purpose, Wander

  Leonard Freed, Michael Eric Dyson (2013). “This is the Day: The March on Washington”, p.104, Getty Publications

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• When I photograph, I am always relating things to one another. Photography shows the connection between things, how they relate.

  Leonard Freed

  Connections, Shows, Relate

  Leonard Freed, Michael Eric Dyson (2013). “This is the Day: The March on Washington”, p.104, Getty Publications

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• Before the first press pictures, the ordinary man would visualize only those events that took place near him, on his street or in his village. Photography opened a window. As the reader's outlook expanded, the world began to shrink.

  Gisele Freund

  Men, Events, Ordinary

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• The lens, that allegedly impartial eye, permits all possible distortions of reality... The importance of photography lies not only in the fact that it is a creation, but above all in the fact that it is one of the most effective means of shaping our ideas and influencing our behavior.

  Gisele Freund

  Lying, Mean, Eye

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• Yet it seems so easy to take a photograph! One forgets that, apart from the technical aspects, photography can be a mental creation and the affirmation of a personality. What is marvelous about a photograph is that its possibilities are infinite; there aren't any subjects 'done to death'.

  Gisele Freund

  Personality, Done, Affirmation

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• Photography is the typical means of expression of a society founded on a civilization of technicians, conscious of the aims it has set for itself... Its power of exactly reproducing external reality, a power inherent in its technique, lends it a documentary character and makes it appear as the most faithful and impartial process for the reproduction of social life.

  Gisele Freund

  Character, Mean, Reality

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• Photography is a great adventure in thinking and looking, a wonderful magic toy that miraculously manages to combine our adult awareness with the fairy-tale world of childhood, a never-ending journey through great and small, through variations and the realm of illusions and appearances, a labyrinthine and specular place of multitudes and simulation.

  Luigi Ghirri

  Adventure, Journey, Thinking

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• The ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images.

  Luigi Ghirri

  Communication, Reading, Way

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• Of course [photography] cannot create, nor express all we want to express. But it can be a witness of our passage on earth, like a notebook.

  Mario Giacomelli

  Notebook, Earth, Want

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• I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.

  Ralph Gibson

  Reality, Order, Chaos

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• I earnestly advise women of artistic tastes to train for the unworked field of modern photography. It seems to be especially adapted to them, and the few who have entered it are meeting with gratifying and profitable success. (1898)

  Gertrude Kasebier

  Taste, Fields, Artistic

  Barbara L. Michaels, Gertrude Käsebier (1992). “Gertrude Käsebier: the photographer and her photographs”, Harry N Abrams Inc

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• It occurs to me that at the beginning one works passionately to learn photography. This takes years, and the craft is usually formed during this period. Then as time passes one finds oneself more in the role of serving the medium... Then, as in the example of several masters that I have been privileged to know personally, it appears that by having devoted oneself totally to the medium, one becomes photography.

  Ralph Gibson

  Years, Crafts, Example

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• Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen.

  Philip Jones Griffiths

  Art, Real, Pursuit

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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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• Aesthetics does not exist for the camera as an isolated entity. Aesthetics, in fact, is inseparable from the purpose of the photographer and the use he makes of his theme. When photography fails... it is usually because a false separation has been imposed on form and content.

  Sid Grossman

  Cameras, Doe, Purpose

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• [Postmodern photography] implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones.

  Andy Grundberg

  World, Photographer, Enough

  Andy Grundberg (1990). “Crisis of the real: writings on photography, 1974-1989”

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• To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting.

  John Gutmann

  Ideas, Painting, Mediums

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