Photography Quotes - Page 34

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

  Albert Renger-Patzsch

  Modern Life, Life Is, Thinkable

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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 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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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Thomas Ruff

  Mediums, Subjects

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

  Allan Sekula

  Promise, Mastery, Anarchy

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• ... the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.

  Lev Manovich

  Technology, Reality, Thinking

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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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