Photography Quotes - Page 33

• I struggle against photography. I struggle against the fact that it is silent, that it is just a piece of paper on the wall, often presented in a tedious white matt frame.

  Michael Light

  Wall, Struggle, White

  "100 Suns and the Nuclear Sublime". Interview with Robert Hirsch, lightresearch.net. July / August 2005.

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• 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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• 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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• I like the idea that the sacred photo framing process is equally violatible and I think that's partly a carryover from the way I deal with structures to the way I deal with photography.

  Gordon Matta-Clark

  Thinking, Ideas, Sacred

  Stephen Walker, Gordon Matta-Clark (2009). “Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism”, I B Tauris & Company Limited

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• Photography seems to fix, but this is an illusion created by our short lives. A photograph is merely a note held for 200 years.

  Douglas McCulloh

  Short Life, Years, Illusion

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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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• 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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• 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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• [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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• These days it seems that physical truth can easily be rearranged, rethought, or re-created outright. Any image can be made pristine, all the warts can be removed. But returning to the source of a thing - the real source - means the photographer has to watch, dig, listen for voices, sniff the smells, and have many doubts. My life in photography has been lived as a skeptic.

  Jerome Liebling

  Real, Mean, Voice

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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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