PHOTOGRAPHY QUOTES II
quotations about photography
Photography bears witness to the passage of time, but it cannot make statements as to the importance of things at any time, nor is it concerned with "truth and beauty" or with teasing out what underlies appearance. Rather, it voraciously records anything in view.
LIZ WELLS
Photography: A Critical Introduction
Composition in photography is almost as varied as composition in music or words -- melodic or atonal, safe or daring -- and can enhance subject, theme, and style. Every photograph you take involves you in some compositional decision, even if this is simply where to set up the camera or when to press the button.
MICHAEL LANGFORD
Basic Photography
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
ROLAND BARTHES
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
KARL LAGERFELD
attributed, Click You!
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
MARC RIBOUD
FotoFest 90: The International Month of Photography: February 10-March 10
Several years ago, I went through a painful writer's block -- a period of silence that lasted six or seven months. I'm convinced that the only thing that really saved me, and led me back to the page, was taking a class in black and white photography. In fact, living with a camera around my neck for a year, and hunting for pictures to shoot, taught me a lot about the importance of the image and its relationship to narrative in writing, something I'd struggled with before discovering photography.
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Gulf Coast, vol. 17, number 1
In order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.
ROLAND BARTHES
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
A photograph is a biography of a moment.
ART SHAY
interview, CBS News, February 13, 2014
Photography is more than a means of recording the obvious. It is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever, whether it be a face or a flower, a place or a thing, a day or a moment.
AARON SISKIND
attributed, The Amateur Photographer's Handbook
Life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference and it is important to see what is invisible to others.
ROBERT FRANK
attributed, Photographic Possibilities
The photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put in the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
The camera is a perfect companion. It makes no demands, imposes no obligations. It becomes your notebook and your reference library, your microscope and your telescope. It sees what you are too lazy or too careless to notice, and it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
AARON SISKIND
attributed, The Amateur Photographer's Handbook
The definition of a picture and the definition of photography is evolving in this truly digital space. Pictures can do things that pictures were never supposed to do.
RUSSELL ARMAND
"How the GIF Is Taking Over the World", Time, March 30, 2016
Photography is a powerful medium of persuasion and propaganda. It has that ring of truth when all the time, in artful hands, it can make any statement the manipulator chooses.
MICHAEL LANGFORD
Basic Photography
Photography, if practiced with high seriousness, is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.
JOHN SZARKOWSKI
Looking at photographs: 100 pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
The photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.... The world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other medium.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, or the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.
EDWARD WESTON
attributed, Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism and Picture Editing
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
JOHN BERGER
About Looking
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
ANSEL ADAMS
attributed, Light and Lens: Photography in the Digital Age
It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.
KATE MORTON
The House at Riverton