Photography Quotes - Page 32

• Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused... this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences.... Photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.

  Taryn Simon

  Beautiful, Quality, Fiction

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• Photography's history is bound to the mistake, to the accident.

  Taryn Simon

  Mistake, Accidents, Bounds

  "Blow-Up Brian De Palma & Taryn Simon in conversation". www.artforum.com. 2012.

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• The photograph doesn't claim to be a participant, or to know, or to be a club member of whatever it's documenting - photography is more demanding when it doesn't pretend to know.

  Taryn Simon

  Clubs, Claims, Members

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• I'm designing a seductive frame to attract an audience to a subject they would otherwise ignore. And that's what I do in all of my photography - give a stage to things that wouldn't normally receive that stage.

  Taryn Simon

  Giving, Design, Seductive

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• Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.

  Taryn Simon

  Ideas, Layers, Foundation

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• Photography, to me, is the dewdrop that reflects my inner and outer worlds simultaneously.

  Raghubir Singh

  World, Outer Worlds

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• I consider myself fortunate that photography exists, because otherwise I'd be stuck in the tragedy of ephemeralness that can come with installation art.

  Sandy Skoglund

  Art, Tragedy, Stuck

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• I think I'm really fortunate to be an installation artist who is heavily invested in photography: I don't have the emotional problems with the loss of work that some installation artists have. The photographs wouldn't exist without the installation... but at the same time, I think I'd kill myself if I only did installations. There's something deeply tragic about doing work that you know is temporal.

  Sandy Skoglund

  Loss, Emotional, Thinking

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• In a world of disturbing images, the general body of photography is bland, dealing complacently with nature and treating our preconceptions as insights. Strange, private worlds rarely slip past our guard.

  Henry Holmes Smith

  Past, World, Body

  Henry Holmes Smith, James Enyeart (1986). “Henry Holmes Smith: collected writings 1935-1985”, Center for Creative Photography

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• Somebody said recently that the best thing a student could do was to get in some shows and publish a book; but nothing about becoming a human being, nothing about having important feelings or concepts of humanity. That's the sort of thing that is bad education. I'd say be a human being first and if you happen to wind up using photography, that's good for photography.

  Henry Holmes Smith

  Book, Wind, Feelings

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• To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.

  Michael Snow

  Art, Depth, Transformation

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• I think it's all absolute nonsense how people talk about photography as being an art. It's a very menial career that you do if you draw badly. Now they teach it at the Royal College of Art and get grand about it. It's the only course there that I don't understand.

  Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon

  Art, College, Thinking

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• If there is a good thing about photography, it is that it can be easily enjoyed.

  Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon

  Good Things, Enjoyed, Ifs

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• Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.

  Abigail Solomon-Godeau

  Art, Exhausted, Mainstream

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• In the final analysis, photography... is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.

  Abigail Solomon-Godeau

  Gun, Finals, Analysis

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• ... photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself.

  Abigail Solomon-Godeau

  Self, Cameras, Video

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• Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.

  Abigail Solomon-Godeau

  Art, Long, Criticism

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• I got into photography because of the immediacy of the medium. I used to sit in front of a canvas for weeks trying to create something. Now I can see the image right away.

  Mario Sorrenti

  Trying, Canvas, Week

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• Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.

  Alec Soth

  Real, Real Life, Surfing

  "A Photographic Tour in the World of Alec Soth". Interview with Jane Gudmundson and Antony Anderson, mag-en.thephotoacademy.com. May 12, 2010.

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• [Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

  Alec Soth

  Way, Related

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• There are only two hard things in photography; which way to point the camera and when to release the shutter.

  Ralph Steiner

  Two, Cameras, Way

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• There is no such thing as the perfect picture. That's the challenge of photography. I was always striving for perfection, even though I knew I could never achieve it. But it kept me reaching for something.

  Phil Stern

  Perfect, Challenges, Strive

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• Photography has always been capable of manipulation. Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it's an interpretation. I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame. You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. There's an infinite number of ways you can do this: photographs have always been authored.

  Joel Sternfeld

  Two, Numbers, People

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• The similarity between Van Gogh, Haiku poetry, and good photography is the concern for mortality. That things are very fleeting, that there are people who are more sensitive to death than others. The threat of time is of great concern to them. And the camera is a very appropriate instrument for many.

  Dennis Stock

  People, Cameras, Fleeting

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• ... photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.

  Ezra Stoller

  Art, Typewriters, Looks

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