Best 2475 quotes in «photography quotes» category

The camera adds a certain sheen to things. Something about being frozen in time really makes things sparkle.

The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.

The camera can push the new medium to its limits - and beyond. It is there - in the "beyond" - that the imaginative photographer will compete with the imaginative painter. Painting must return to the natural world from time to time for renewal of the artistic vision. The key sector of renewal of vision today is the new vistas revealed by science. Here photography, which is not only art but science also, stands on the firmest ground.

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything around me.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

The challenge of photography is to show the thing photographed so that our feelings are awakened and hidden aspects are revealed to us

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.

The changes taking place in this part of Europe are enormous and very rapid. One world is disappearing. I am trying to photograph what's left. I have always been drawn to what is ending, what will soon no longer exist.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

The coherent way of investigating any field is to examine its possible relatedness to other things.

The commonest forms of amateur natural history in the United States are probably gardening, bird watching, the maintenance of aquarium fish, and nature photography.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

The contemporary artist...is not bound to a fully conceived, previsioned end. His mind is kept alert to in-process discovery and a working rapport is established between the artist and his creation. While it may be true, as Nathan Lyons stated, 'The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows,' is it not also conceivable that the mind knows more than the eye and the camera can see?

The creative process can sustain itself throughout the entire celebration of photography.

The danger lies in unconventional experiments signaling for a general license to do as they please, and pass off sloppy workmanship as creative intention.

The decisive moment, the popular Henri Cartier-Bresson approach to photography in which a scene is stopped and depicted at a certain point of high visual drama, is now possible to achieve at any time. One's photographs, years later, may be retroactively rephotographed by repositioning the photographer or the subject of the photograph, or by adding elements that were never there before but now are made to exist concurrently in a newly elastic sense of space and time.

The desert ... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes ... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.

The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that's a step in the right direction.

The development of a love of medium and a responsibility for one's own pictures is an overall goal.

The difference in 'seeing' between the eye and the lens should make it obvious that a photographer who merely points his camera at an appealing subject and expects to get an appealing picture in return, may be headed for a disappointment.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

The discussion about whether photography is or isn't art is dated and of no interest. Your work makes you an artist, not your title.

The digital tools allow us to have control over what and how we can alter an image that was unimaginable in the era of analog photography.

The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color ? to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merly decorative. Some photographers use it brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty.

The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.

The dismal half-baked images of the average "reportage" and "documentary" photography are self dammning... the slick manner, the slightly obscure significance, the esoteric fear of simple beauty for its own sake - I am deeply concerned with these manifestations of decay. Gene Smith's work validates my most vigorous convictions that if the documentary photographs is to be truly effective it must contain elements of art, intensity, fine craft and spirituality. All these his work contains and we may turn to his work with gratitude, appreciation and great respect.

The durational aspect of video art is very different from photography or sculpture. The idea of looping things interferes with that a little bit. It eliminates that finite viewing period which I think is not so expressive sometimes.

The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.

The emphasis in doing any in-depth photography is on building relationships, quality relationships. It's what I call thirty-cups-of-coffee-a-frame photography. You need to enter into the community - not just photographically, but intellectually and emotionally.

The element of discovery is very important. I don't repeat myself well. I want and need that stimulus of walking forward from one new world to another. There is something demoralizing about going back to a place to retake pictures. You can no longer see your subjects in a fresh eye; you keep comparing them with the pictures you hold in your memory. [The] world was full of discoveries waiting to be made...(as a photographer) I could share the things I saw and learned...you would react to something all others might walk by.

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.

The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

The fight for photography became my life.

The first time, I usually skim off the outer layer and end up with photographs that are fairly obvious. The second time, I have to look a little deeper. The images get more interesting. The third time it is even more challenging and on each subsequent occasion, the images should get stronger, but it takes more effort to get them.

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.

The French have a different take on photography than Americans do. They consider photography to be absolutely parallel to literature. That often makes for a deeper perception of the work.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.

The greatest compliment that I know how to pay another photographer is to say, 'I never would have made that photograph myself. I'm sure glad you did.' You hope along the way that maybe, once in a while, you do that for someone else.